Like Son

by Felicia Luna Lemus

  “What’s this?”

  “Your anniversary gift.”

  “And what exactly is my anniversary gift, dear?”

  “’Shrooms. In honey. For my sweet,” I said as casually as possible, and left her cup of coffee on the counter.

  “Seriously?”

  “The honey’s a preservative,” I offered, even though I knew she wasn’t seeking further explanation on that particular detail.

  “Frank, I know that. Hello, ’shrooms?”

  The quizzical look on her face was totally understandable. We didn’t typically keep stashes of hallucinogens in the honey, let alone anywhere in the apartment. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have considered the idea before, but we simply hadn’t. So …

  I explained. Rather, I told her the part I was willing to reveal at that point:

  The Monday after she phoned from Texas, I’d called my temp placement office and said I was available for assignment again. The next day, I reported to the corporate insurance company I’d been at before my week out “sick.” For eight hours a day, I entered data into Excel spreadsheets, ran a few interoffice hand deliveries, and did some copying like a good little trained monkey. It fucking sucked, but whatever, there were free bagels in the break room, and it paid well. Unfortunately, on the first day back I was in the Xerox room copying some account summaries when I ran into this one other temp dude. I’d made the mistake of going to lunch with him when I’d first been assigned to the company, and I’d since learned he was the sort of person who would corner you and talk at you with his bad breath for hours at a time if you let him. He was a totally self-righteous artist-wannabe type who was maybe in his early twenties, but who threw vibe like he was Malcolm X, Buddha, and Che all rolled up into a single slow-moving slim muscled body. One time he’d shown me the T-shirt he wore under his office drag. It was black and it said Gun Club of Brooklyn on it. The shirt would have been cool except its wearer tried way too hard. For instance: Once, in that same Xerox room, Cool Dude parted his cotton-mouthed lips to tell me I needed to learn how to aim and shoot firearms.

  “I don’t like guns,” I’d said.

  “Neither do I, but come the revolution, you will need them,” he’d replied with barely a smidgen of irony.

  So anyway, there we were in the Xerox room again. And I still had several stacks of copies to make. I was stuck. For reasons unknown, he asked if I’d be interested in buying some ’shrooms. He said his hippie parents had given them to him during a visit to their recently acquired New Mexico retirement adobe.

  “I’ve never seen so much goddamned turquoise jewelry. And all the strung-up red chiles in adobe doorways … God, I fucking hate the Southwest,” he’d said.

  I tried to change the subject. He asked again if I wanted the ’shrooms.

  “He wouldn’t quit pestering me,” I told Nathalie.

  What I didn’t tell Nathalie was that I took Cool Dude up on his offer because of her. I figured if she wanted things to be an adventure all the time, then fine, I’d buy the ’shrooms and give them to her when she came back. Maybe then she’d realize she didn’t have to leave to escape. I was plenty aware that Nathalie was handful enough without the added benefit of hallucinogens, organic or not, but if she was determined to put on a show, not only was I game, but I could match her and up the ante some.

  “He said they’re really good,” I added.

  Jar still in hand, Nathalie smiled.

  “Let’s eat them,” she said.

  “They’re for you, sweetie.”

  “You’re not going to do any?”

  “Nah, not my thing.”

  “Come on, Frank.”

  “They’re all yours.”

  “I want to do them now.”

  “Okay,” I said, pretending I couldn’t care less one way or the other, knowing full well my seeming indifference would push her in exactly the direction I was hoping she’d go.

  It was all perfect, really. Truly. I had such a fucking perfect plan.

  I took the Mason jar from Nathalie and sat at the kitchen table. Nathalie grabbed her coffee and joined me. Vacuumsealed golden lid unscrewed, I dipped my right index finger in the jar and coated it with honey.

  “They used to do this at flea circuses,” I said.

  Messy sticky finger, I wrote N-A-T in cursive on the tabletop. A cluster of the ants—relatives of those that had arrived the night Nat first called from the road—bolted from their tidy marching line along the wall to eat the bounty. Within minutes, Nathalie’s name appeared in pulsing, living script. As the ants then carried the honey away on their backs or antennae or however it is ants transport such things, we watched Nathalie’s name disappear like some Seurat pointillist print turning to ash. Best part was knowing that, trace amounts of the ’shrooms in each molecule of the honey, those ants—same as me—would be forever changed after their first taste of Nathalie.

  “Be ready in an hour,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “We’re going to the forest.”

  I handed her the jar of ’shrooms and left.

  By early afternoon, we were in a crappy rented station wagon at the gas station under the FDR at East 23rd. Faux bored expression, Nathalie sat on the passenger side of the front bench seat and pretended not to watch as I maneuvered a squeegee with refined show-off skill.

  “No point in a pleasure drive if the windshield is dirty,” I said—this bit of advice once sarcastically offered to me by my blind father himself.

  After each stroke, gray soapy water dripping down the windshield, I wiped the squeegee’s rubber blade across a stiff tree-bark paper towel. If all I could do was provide Nathalie a clear view, I hoped that this in and of itself might just be enough to keep her by my side.

  Our station wagon’s failing automatic transmission lurched into high gear as I pulled out and headed north on the FDR. Nathalie turned slightly green as her stomach acids went on overdrive to digest the hallucinogens into little particles of sugared brain-trick. She curled into a legs-up and chin-onknees position.

  “We’re really going to the forest?” she asked.

  “Where else would I get a tree to plant on Avenue B for you?”

  “No joke?”

  “No joke.”

  “Cool.”

  Really, my plan was a joke, a pathetically comical excuse to make sure I got to spend the day with Nathalie, alone, in situations—driving along the highway, stopping deep in the forest—that she couldn’t easily leave. So why didn’t we just go for a drive to Maine for some lobster dinner or something? Well:

  1. Lobster smells like piss, it’s no good without melted butter, and dairy gave me the shits.

  2. Have you ever heard a lobster scream when it’s boiled?

  3. No lobster place would be open on Thanksgiving night.

  4. Nathalie would never have been into such a conventional trip, even if it had been a good idea.

  Put simply, our anniversary celebration had to be outrageous and unexpected. Self-consciously so. Or else Nathalie would find it drab. And really, what could be more outrageous or unexpected than driving out to the forest on Thanksgiving to steal a tree to plant in a pothole in the middle of the East Village as a declaration of love? It was perfect. Or so I hoped.

  Nathalie groaned and I looked over to see that not only had she turned even greener from carsickness, but she was now shivering, and her face glistened with a light sweat.

  “Nat, should I pull over?”

  “No. Thank you,” she answered haltingly.

  She rolled down the passenger window and closed her eyes. Late-afternoon sunlight, diffused into patches of crimson and bright gold, pulsed through the windshield. Within fifteen minutes, Nathalie was asleep.

  Two hours north of the city, I parked on the side of a deserted woodland road and turned off the station wagon’s rattling engine. Nathalie didn’t yawn, wake up, or even move. I returned to the car twenty minutes later, dragging my plucked forest prize. Scratching
struggle, I tucked the evergreen sapling into the station wagon’s flat bed. Nathalie still slept.

  An hour into our drive home, an SUV abruptly pulled across my lane in an ill-conceived effort to get to his exit. I slammed on the brakes. No crash ensued, but I cussed plenty and the sapling shifted audibly. Nathalie finally opened her eyes. Even in the dark of night, I could see her pupils were like pixilated sequins, all shifting and watery.

  “Honey,” she said, very quietly.

  “Yes?” I asked, touched by the unexpected nicety.

  “I mean I taste honey,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “She cut through me like a pavement saw.”

  Fuck left field, I swore sometimes Nathalie came from outside the stadium entirely.

  “’Shrooms kick in?” I asked.

  “No,” she said humorlessly.

  “You got a good nap at least.”

  “The ’shrooms were bunk. I crashed from all the honey.” And then she said again: “She cut through me like a pavement saw.”

  Silence.

  “It’s Nahui’s inscription. From A dix ans sur mon pupitre, remember?” she asked.

  Maybe the ’shrooms were working just the tiniest bit.

  “Of course I remember,” I said.

  “I like it.”

  “Me too. In fact, maybe …”

  Before I could finish my thought, Nathalie blurted out, “Frank, pull over, quick.”

  “You okay?”

  “Please, pull over,” she whined through clenched teeth.

  I jerked to the gravel side of the highway. Nathalie threw her door open, bolted out, and puked next to some trashclotted shrubs. I rushed to her side.

  “Baby, can I do anything?”

  Embarrassed, she waved me away. And I hate to say this, but thank God she didn’t want me there. The smell of her toxic vomit made me gag. I waited for her in the station wagon.

  “Feel better?”

  “Not really.”

  We drove across the George Washington Bridge just as the digits on the station wagon’s dashboard clock reconfigured to read 7:00. Nathalie would have under ten hours to hydrate, rest, and prepare herself properly.

  4:45 A.M. Tompkins Square Park and the entire East Village the quietest it ever got, in the sore strip of East 7th Street at Avenue B, out front the newest crappy boutique with the vaguely plastic name, an evergreen tree was about to appear.

  I located the deepest of metropolitan potholes in said intersection and asked Nathalie for her assistance. As she leaned the delicate sapling against her shivering body, its trunk soiled her winter coat, and its fragile upper branches tangled in her hair. I bowed down on my knees with tools at my side.

  The asphalt was fucking freezing, but I didn’t care. Barehanded, I centered the sapling’s roots in their pothole cradle and unloaded a bag of soil and some heavy rocks to make a tight and solid base. My victory garden firmly anchored, I secured a gold glittering craft-store bird, all spray-painted cheap chicken feathers and Styrofoam core, to the sapling’s uppermost branch. I felt a tension in my chest I didn’t even know I’d been carrying with me loosen. I could breathe. Deeply. And so I did. Breathe. Deeply. A brisk green scent filled my lungs and sparked the most fantastic mood. I beamed a smile at Nathalie. She smiled back, though with considerably less exuberance.

  The police didn’t come. Nobody walked by or yelled reprimands from their apartment window. The few cars that drove past were careful to not hit us, but didn’t acknowledge our existence otherwise. Encouraged by what seemed to be a late-night downtown superhuman cloak of invisibility, I added the final touch with particularly careful and loving calm.

  Billy the Kid, that pimply faced boy in tight cowboy regalia, always wrote press releases to leave at his own crime scenes. Inspired by his ingenuity, I hung a gold picture frame from the sapling’s strongest branch. Penned in gold ink, the press release simply read:

  She cut through me like a pavement saw.

  A love letter. From Nahui. To my father’s mother. From me. To Nathalie. For the entire world to read.

  As the sun rose and we sat at the kitchen table drinking mugs of hot carob soy milk, I gave Nathalie my hand.

  “Splinter,” I said.

  Thrown off for only a second, Nathalie walked to the kitchen and took a small safety pin from her ancient dress’s fallen hem. She lit the stove’s pilot and held the tip in the orange flame until silver turned black and then red and glowing hot. Seated in her chair by my side again, she took my hand and, austere surgical grace, pushed pointed metal through the top layers of my thick skin. Her pupils huge in the apartment’s dim light, she asked if the pin hurt.

  “No,” I replied.

  She smiled quietly and applied more pressure. When I finally flinched, she waited a moment before removing the pin and pulling the splinter from my skin. Pin wiped clean and the hem of her gown refastened, she took my finger to her mouth. I watched as she sucked a single drop of blood from my fingertip. The dull ache in my finger disappeared.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said, and licked her lips.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Nat and I eventually crashed around seven that morning. When we finally came to and peeled our dry eyes open again, it was late afternoon and we were wicked hungry. Hungry—like if a small child had entered the apartment we just might have Texas-barbequed him and served him up with a side of slaw. In search of comfort food, something soaked in grease and bathed in salt, something that would stick heavily to our insides and ground us, we tugged on clothes and headed out to 2nd Ave Deli. But first we detoured to Avenue B. Of course, the tree and gold-framed love letter were already long gone. Even the pothole was back to its original deep-pit state. In fact, we were only able to find the tiniest tidbit of evidence that Project Evergreen hadn’t been some sort of mutual hallucination. A few gold feathers from the craft-store bird I’d secured to the tree lay wedged in the cracked asphalt near the pothole. As we left, I picked up the feathers and put them in my pocket.

  We made it to 2nd Ave Deli and happily suffered customary abuse from the helmet-haired hostess and our probably once-vixen eighty-year-old waitress, Daisy. Buckets of bitter deli coffee and mounds of potato pancakes with applesauce and ketchup later, stuffed to the gills and moving even slower than when we woke, we eventually moseyed back home, hand-in-hand, neither of us in any particular rush. We were on 9th Street, just past First Avenue, when someone called out Nathalie’s name.

  We stopped and stared at each other, not sure where the voice had come from.

  “Up here, silly!”

  We looked up to find the singsong interruption lilting out from a fourth-floor apartment window. A pretty little fag in a striped polo shirt and jeans was posing at the windowsill like the parade had taken a side route and the float had gotten stuck four floors up. Princess kept waving and smiling—so many teeth, such a pearly smile—and I had absolutely no fucking idea who he was.

  “Georgie!” Nat squealed up at him.

  Georgie?

  “Get up here this instant, missy,” he commanded, planting his hands on his hips and scowling.

  Nat giggled like a schoolgirl.

  “And bring that yummy creature with you,” he purred, peering down at me.

  “Nat?” I asked through a polite smile.

  “That’s George.”

  Uh, okay. And?

  “He’s from the ad agency I worked at a couple months ago.”

  “Buzz number five!” he called down to us, and disappeared back into his apartment.

  “Want to go up?” Nat asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Ah, come on, he’s really sweet.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Okay, love. I’ll be home soon.” She gave me a peck on the cheek and skipped off to buzz George’s number five.

  I continued onward until, six doors west from Avenue A, on the north side of the street, I saw a red and white rental sign
propped in the window of an empty storefront. Instead of heading off to the warmth and comfort of home, I found myself staring in through the empty storefront’s smudged windows. It was one of those moments that will never make sense to anyone else no matter how many times I try to explain it. For some reason, as I stared into that tiny and sad-looking space, it hit me that I was thirty and that I didn’t want to be a temp for stupid fucking corporate America anymore. Maybe Nathalie’s return activated some primal desire to make a life for us. I don’t know, but as sudden and totally illogical as it may have been, I knew I wanted to rent the storefront. I wanted to open a little shop and be my own boss and set my own hours and create a livelihood of my own from the ground up. Yes, just like that. Out of fucking nowhere. Told you it didn’t make sense. But that’s what happened. Some sort of rattling alarm went off inside me, and there was no going back to sleep. I memorized the phone number on the sign and went home.

  It wasn’t until later that night that I got up the nerve to call the number. Nathalie was cooking dinner and pretending to not listen as I talked to the property owner.

  When I hung up, she waited several minutes before finally asking, “Anything you’d like to tell me?”

  “There’s a For Rent sign on 9th.”

  “A For Rent sign?”

  “I was thinking maybe I could open a shop.”

  “A shop? What kind of shop?”

  “I don’t know, like cool vintage stuff or something.”

  “Babe, where’s this coming from?”

  That was the first time I tried to explain. I could tell from the look on Nathalie’s face that my newfound goal sounded insane.

  “Okay, first of all,” she said, “there are already tons of shops like that in the neighborhood.”

  “I know, but mine would be better.”

  “It probably would be, but seriously, since when did you want to open a shop?”

  Why did Nathalie have to get so damned sensible all of a sudden?

  “I just thought of it today.”