by Bill Peters
“What are you doing?” Mindy Fale says. “What is wrong?”
I flex my stomach muscles to keep from screaming. I also get pants, which, like everything else I do now apparently, is no longer funny. The cashier radar-guns the items and swipes my ESL card. The swipe machine makes a long, microwave-type beeping noise. She swipes it again; beeping noise. I slap at my neck. She folds a plastic shopping bag around the card and swipes again. Same beeping noise.
“This card’s being declined for whatever reason,” the cashier says.
Mindy Fale sighs, head rolling toward her left shoulder.
“Can you cover this for me?” I ask her.
People in line behind us hang clothes over their forearms and shift their weight.
“I can’t do that,” Mindy Fale says.
“My paycheck comes Tuesday, I swear.”
I step aside from the line. I tell Mindy Fale: “You have no problem blowing $150 on your friends at Outback-freaking-Fakehouse!”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not different! How?”
She looks past me, face completely flat expression-wise. “It’s just different.”
I hang the clothing on a rack of girls’ pink winter coats and walk out after her. She throws a quarter in the fountain, this blue-tiled thing with a pile of plastic rocks that the water runs down. I flip up my hands.
“I was saying a prayer,” she says.
“Jesus charges twenty-five cents per prayer? A prayer for what?”
“I’m not saying.”
People walk past us: a man in a sweater tapping on a PalmPilot; a toddler in a pink dress holding the hand of a large, shaved-headed guy with a black T-shirt that says ALKQN in gold, medieval-looking lettering.
“Give me your purse,” I say.
She stops. “No. Freak.”
“I get paid next week. Just give me your wallet.” Suddenly I’m cranky. I always forget that two pints at a restaurant makes you way more cranky than two pints at a bar.
“No. That’s assault.”
A chinfat man with a Flutie jersey. A red-haired kid with a shirt that says LOSER, who mock-punches a tall skinny kid in a Celtics tank top.
Mindy Fale starts walking. “Wait,” I say. I reach toward her to see if she’ll let me touch her. And on accident, I hook my ring finger and pinky into her purse strap. Her shoulder yanks back, she swings around, and her arms are thick and bullish and, on accident or on purpose, the heel of her hand flies into my cheek. “Damn!” someone yells.
The embarrassment dulls the pain. More than anything, I’m concentrating on standing up straight, trying to look as casual as possible: “We’ve got a live one here,” I say, apparently, to everyone here.
She draws her fist back. I flinch, my shoulders seize. But she checks her swing, and when I open my eyes she’s walking away again. Then I follow her to the car and she drives us home.
She doesn’t say anything until we get on the highway, and she flips her blinker on to go around a truck. “I just don’t think you understand how much of an insult it is,” she says. “You think I like taking calls all day about property and casualty? I don’t like my job either. But I still work hard so we can at least have money. I paid for your dinner, paid to get you drunk tonight, and you thought nothing of it. And you whine and whine about this job that was handed to you by your friend.”
“I’m not whining; I’m complaining.”
A Mustang with an undercarriage blacklight streaks past us.
“My dad gave Jamie $50,000—for permits, whatever, to open that rims shop,” she says. “But he went out and bought trunk speakers for his Civic. Even after he sold his ring, he still owes me $4,000—credit card payments, a certain trip to a certain clinic he said he’d pay for. For you to have to borrow money, this quickly, is a bad sign.”
Never mind that we’re not married, so it defeats her point, so never mind.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe you’re just happier not working.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
But it feels far worse than any complaint she could make about me. I already miss, like childhood, when she’d say “See you tomorrow Mister Natebones Gray” before kissing my head goodnight—the way it implied the future. I want so badly to get home so I can wash the dishes and pick my socks up from under the coffee table and throw them in the hamper, and then: I get the Idea. It hits me like a musical.
“I’ve got it,” I tell her. “I have a Plan.”
We get back to the apartment, and I leap down the stairwells of each floor and unlock our basement storage closet. I peel the blanket off the Cosimus Belvende Propeller and drag it up the stairs, angling it through our apartment door, scraping the floor, banging the lamp hanging from the ceiling above the dinner table and knocking a paper towel roll off the kitchen counter. I set it upright against the living room wall.
Mindy Fale, already in her pajama pants and on the couch, blinks six or seven times.
“Exactly,” I go. “Exactly. But!” I tell her what Necro told me—about the government testing planes; about Cosimus Belvende, who came here from Italy, about tantalum oxide and camera lenses. I say Brownie Hawkeye.
“This is the last piece of the plane that invented Kodak,” I tell her. “Museums will pay thousands for this. If I sell this, I could pay rent and groceries for you for years. This is the propeller from the plane that Cosimus Belvende, aka George Eastman, used to build this city.”
The wooden propeller leans there, brown.
Mindy Fale, then, belts out this laugh. A smart anger-laugh, that rises for a few seconds into almost-joy.
“George Eastman was born in Waterville, New York, Nate,” she says and starts laughing again.
I think: Did Necro, in his own way with his story about the propeller, completely tell me off one last time? Did he make all that up just to get back at me?
“Cosimus Belvende? You fucking retard. The Italian deer hunter? Thee?”
Later that night, she lies on the couch under a yellow and black Kodak blanket I got after my first month there. She watches the movie Labyrinth at least twice.
“Standing there and staring at me is not going to make this better,” she says. Then she adds, “I hate that.”
“I’m going to work on what’s wrong with me,” I say.
“What?”
“I know. I need to do better. I’m going to try to do better.”
“Good,” she says. “Good for you.”
Because, when I go to bed, the heat’s coming on. Listen to the radiator fizz sulfur under the bedroom window, the first hiss. Smell the leftover soot from the summer. It’s been a warm fall, one I T-shirted most of the way through. These things are enjoyed more with women, Mindy Fale being a woman.
When I wake up, it’s 9:31 a.m. on Sunday. My T-shirt collar is soaked, my pajama pants are damp on the backs of the knees, in a way where I know I slept the shit out of the evening. But Mindy Fale’s not next to me. The sheets on Mindy Fale’s side of the bed are drawn up to the pillow. When I look into the kitchen and living room, it’s quiet. The Kodak blanket is folded on the couch’s armrest. The sun is like a radioactive egg yolk through the windows. The silverware in our kitchen sink’s dry rack glows like a condensed electrical fire.
“Hey. You here?” I say.
“Mindy?” I say louder, a wine glass ringing by the sink.
Her toothbrush is still wrapped in a piece of toilet paper on the sink edge. When I unwrap it, I press the brush to my lips; it’s dry. The clothes she wore last night aren’t in the hamper, the closet, her dresser. The orange Evening Tic Tac I set under her pillow last night—which I just made up so we could take them before bed and have a Thing we did as a couple—is still there.
I think, immediately, that I can’t be here anymore—how can I sit here and wait, if Mindy Fale went out after I went to bed? I think that, immediately, I need to go find Necro. I need to find Necro and ask him were you lying or not about the $4
0,000 Cosimus Belvende Propeller, because I am running out of money and I am running out of my sense of humor and I am running out of people.
But I’ve heard nothing from Necro at all. And Mindy Fale? I’ll just grind my teeth at the back of her head until I die of rage at age fifty. I haven’t kissed her on the lips in six days. Her skin tastes like Vaseline and grilled Avon. Mindy Fale is nothing but another fight.
So this is what I have left: the growing loudness in my head, and the sofa, and the shelves that me and Mindy Fale made from taped-together milk crates. And all I can say is I need to think; I need to think; it’s all over and I need to go somewhere and think this thing away like wind smoothing out a rock for three thousand years.
And right then, I know what it is that I’ve needed to think.
I empty my milk crates of clothing and jam my T-shirts, jeans, underwear, toothbrush and shampoo into a trash bag. I take some leftover rope from the move and strap the Cosimus Belvende Propeller to the roof of the car, just in case I need to shove $40,000 in Mindy Fale’s face at some far-later point in my life. In our basement storage cage, I unstack our plastic storage bins and unsnap their tops. I dig through the paper stacks—chafing my knuckles on stacks of old homework assignments, a strand of basement spider web on my tongue—until I find the retreat pamphlets at the bottom that Fake Dad No. 3 gave me.
One pamphlet has a picture of clouds stretching outward from a sunrise and, below it, the address in King of Prussia of a place called Continual Center. On another pamphlet, a picture looking down from a cliff into a pond shaped like a human brain. On one of the pages inside, Fake Dad No. 3 has double-underlined a passage that says: “—not at the master, but yet the master. Yet” and that’s it.
Outside, the apartment houses seem bigger and more evenly spaced than usual, paint jobs cleaned by the sunlight when I drive past. The trees are bare as capillaries, and the orange and yellow leaves on the grass are bright and wet and spaced like stars. I take the long way to the expressway, past Park Ave., my favorite street, with houses like tuxedos. Then down through 490, through the tollbooth, and onto I-90.
I unstick a cigarette from the orange coils of the lighter, and when I go over a slight, uphill curve the farmlands explode into view—green and tan velvet rising like stomachs; a red barn and, up in the woodland hills, a house, peach like a vitamin shard. CMF’s wattage is surprisingly strong—it’s always some little peppermint from Christ when you hear three good songs in a row—and “Bark at the Moon” throws some static punches at “Sussudio” from some Syracuse station and wins.
I pass the first interstate fast-food stop, which only makes me think of when Mom, before she gave up on it altogether, drove me during April break to look at the SUNYs and talk to people about colleges. On the highway, we stopped for gas. Already I missed home; I was so nervous, head-and-lungs nervous, about having to go to Cortland or Fredonia or Albany, even just to consider living there. And I looked in the rearview mirror at the gas station attendant unscrewing the gas cap—this kid who was a more baked, stubbly version of me—and I said to myself: I want to be that guy. He gets to stay here tonight and not be nervous.
But now I am that guy! And that guy is asking me: Do you even know how to get to King of Prussia? Did you even call about a retreat registration? Don’t you know Muler and the T-Gods are playing the Bug Jar tonight?
But it’s like when you watch a dog charge through an electric fence—the collar box sending electricity through the dog’s neck, the dog hustling it through to freedom—and outside Syracuse, a static frenzy eats up one last Boston song (try not to hear a Boston song on CMF—the Boston Challenge, me and Necro called it!) before it’s gone. And I haven’t earned a Muler concert yet anyway.
I get on I-81, only the second interstate highway I’ve ever been on. King of Prussia: I know nothing about it. Maybe I’ll move there. And maybe everyone will finally ask: Have you heard from Nate? I heard he disappeared; I heard his apartment had no furniture and just a lamp on the floor and he prefers that; I heard people just listen when he talks; I heard he turned thirty in Cincinnati; I heard he turned thirty-four in Arizona; I heard he’s really mellowed out since 1999; I drove all the way out there to ask him how I should describe the ocean or a nuclear power plant as seen from an airplane, or the feeling of waiting for someone you love to go to bed so you can be up, alone, and he said nothing to me. Not a word.
But when I eventually do come back to Rochester, five days from now, one month from now, ten years from now—I’ll let it be long if I need to—my brain will be so lean I won’t even need to wonder. “How was King of Prussia? Are you different now?” everyone I’ve known will ask. And after I tell them “That’s not a question,” I’ll never need to call anyone again.
I’ll feel some lengths of forearm muscle do some unsung work when I shake the hands of the managers in the city, and at Kodak or Xerox or 4-H or Wegmans, my thoughts will arrive one after another through the turnstile, each task a present I’ll wrap and send along. And, finally, I’ll find Necro who, at that point, might be just Andrea, the way Toby is Toby Winter and Lip Cheese, all along, has been Kevin Posniak. And we’ll both say, minds clear and boring, “Nothing much. Just working,” and drink some Shea’s and get tired early and go home, certain in the morning that we have nothing left to say.
Then someone will have the whole city to himself—to lick salt off margarita glasses at that new Mexican place, adopt a dog and name it “Dad,” buy a Dryden Theatre film pass, sit alone, empty seats to the left and the right, and wear a pair of 3D glasses if they ever do 3D Movie Week again, smirking whenever a character turns to the camera and points a huge index finger into the eyes of the audience. Someone with taste for once, with a way of walking under banquet archways without smiling too much. Someone who waves off the trays of toothpick snacks and waits calmly for everyone to break eye contact—no need to scribble phone numbers on place cards or torn-off program pages. Someone who leaves as the staff removes the tablecloths, into the quiet night on East Avenue, one car left under the parking lot lamps. Someone named me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
And with that, ten years of my life. Thanks go to my parents, for their enduring patience and sense of humor about all this. In Rochester, thank-yous to the original Winjas, responsible for much of my own sense of humor and more than a few private references in this book: Nick, Brad, Derek, Dan, Amie, Kris, Philippe, and Mike, who we have been unable to track down. In New England: Pete, Greg, Matt, Ben, Katie, Ian, Adam, Sabrina—I wouldn’t have gotten into metal or read David Foster Wallace or looked up court documents without you. In Gainesville: everyone on Team Dora for, if nothing else, the clutch viewings of “Pelts.”
Likewise, the Massachusetts Cultural Council came through when I’d given up. Thanks as well to Sabina Murray, Noy Holland, Sam Michel and John Wideman, who righted my brain fiction-wise. Infinite thanks to Leigh Newman, for her enthusiasm, criticism, insight and overall wonderfulness. And, obviously, thanks to everyone else at Black Balloon Publishing for believing in this book.
Bigger debts are owed to Grace Paley, whose writing profoundly changed mine, and whose story “The Little Girl” was in part a basis for the second-to-last chapter; Stanley Elkin, whose story “A Poetics for Bullies” I’ve been trying to write for years; George Saunders, Harold Brodkey and Amy Hempel, in general; and Judge Judy, for the line “I’m the boss, applesauce.”
Parts of “A Thing to Invest” and “Home of Triscuit” originally appeared in a short story called “A Thing to Invest,” which was published in Pleiades. Thanks to the editors. General information on Timothy McVeigh was obtained from articles published by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. The excerpt of McVeigh’s letter, as quoted by Bambert Tolby, was taken from a 1997 article published in The Los Angeles Times. The line “I’ve been tried as one,” whose origins Nate cannot specifically place, is from The Simpsons.
Finally, thank you to Donna Wrublewski, for
her very existence. In a book of in-jokes, my love for you is MegaBagelon-sized.