by Charles Bock
She eased the door open and found the room as she'd grown to dread it: the bed made and neat, the carpet barren of the strewn clothes and toys that used to frustrate her. A residue of dust swirled in the half-light of the space where the window curtains did not quite meet. Lorraine walked the perimeter of the room, looking absently at toys, at mementos, finally, at nothing. She sat on the edge of the bed, and soon enough was remembering: moments when she'd come to tuck in her son, talk about his homework, or make peace with him after some sort of problem, mornings when he had to be up early and knocking brought no answer so she'd eased the door open and watched her son sleeping and peaceful, and she had been filled with love for him, so much love for this beautiful fucking child of hers, even when she could see he was faking and just did not want to get up to go to school; even when she had places to go and people to see, and did not have the time or energy for his crap, her love for him still could come out from hiding and just about make her heart burst. But these were the easy memories. The convenient ones. Truth was, when Newell had first turned up missing, these were the memories she'd willed into being whenever she used to come in here. They'd been a comfort, a natural defense mechanism. Today, however, these memories had accumulated almost mystifying levels of complexity. It was almost impossible for Lorraine to make sense of them, to feel anything beyond wear.
The bedspread. A cluttered goulash of red and gray images promoting the university basketball team. Lorraine straightened it a little, then stopped and let herself go beyond the easy memories. She recalled looking through a catalogue with her husband, how Lincoln had wished the boy wanted something with the logo of a Major League Baseball team. She lingered on her husband's ability to give in on that matter. After everything she'd been through with Link, Lorraine remained impressed at his ability to distance his preferences from those of his son's.
This afternoon she let her mind wander, gave herself to the poltergeists. A pillowcase looked clean unless you were the child's mother, in which case you could still make out the outline from the night when you had gone upstairs to ask about a school bake sale, and had surprised your child in his bed, causing him to spill the soda that house rules prohibited him from bringing upstairs, and that he should not have had anyway. Lorraine walked around inside the memories; even as their details rushed her, she lingered on every single one—the boy's pajamas getting soaked; the fantasy book he had been reading.
And the sports posters, curling at their edges, straining against the tape and wall tacks that held them in place. The pool of nickels and quarters and matchbooks that had accumulated on the boy's bureau—those, Lorraine steered herself away from, willfully directing her attention from Lincoln's belongings, toward the bookshelf: the comic books and school primers, the arrangement of die-cast figures. The room was pregnant with memories. An imagination unfurling; Newell explaining, from the sedan's rear seat, how he had set up this particular battle, and then the conflict's root. Lorraine saw herself pretending to listen, saw her son behind her, his mouth moving, forming unheard words. A different drive home now; Newell not responding to her inquiries, sullen, his one-word answers, his head in a comic.
At a hobby store she had examined all sorts of paints and tubes and thin brushes and flagged down a passing salesman and voiced her concerns about the model paint, making sure it was not lead-based and would not be harmful, and the child got impatient, he already was upset that she wanted to buy the cheaper kind of paint and not the officially sponsored brand of the National Association for Fantasy Figures, and he pointed to words on the label that said safe for kids, and Lorraine remembered this even as she looked at the grand total, those three figures that had ended up getting painted.
With no small amount of love, she could not help but remember the boy complaining that he was bored, and there was nothing to do. She'd respond with, Why don't you paint some of your action men, and he'd look at her as if she were insane. Maybe so. Maybe she was.
When she had been that age she had loved ballet and used to practice the drills in her room for hours on end. With each plié there was the possibility for physical perfection. Lorraine had tried to work toward that perfection, focusing on each movement, getting each part of the whole correct.
But then you couldn't get life correct, could you?
You look back and see clues everywhere, but how were you supposed to know? A twelve-year-old boy is attracted to darkness. To special effects and sarcasm. Saying no when any idiot could see the answer was yes. If every boy with a short attention span and a propensity for smart remarks abandoned his life, who would be left? In her weaker moments she could blame Lincoln for coddling the child, for being the one who got to spoil him, for forcing her to be the disciplinarian and watchdog she'd never wanted to be; but at the end of the day, her anger was pointless, the strap of ribbon that swirls from a maypole in a hurricane. It was easy to say that Newell spent too much time watching television or playing video games; the truth is that there are times when you have to cook or clean or need a moment to yourself and a television or game gets him out of your hair. That was not an indication of their abilities as parents.
They had tried to give Newell everything he had wanted. Where was the crime in that? They had poured their best wishes and hopes for the world into their son; what more could you ask for? And their boy knew he was loved. They had made sure of this much.
But Lorraine could repeat these sentences to herself so many times. She could console herself with a million fund-raisers, immerse herself in untold lost causes. In the end all she was left with were clichés. A pristine room of reminders. Everything waiting for the boy to return, waiting to pick up exactly where things had left off. He would be preparing for eighth grade right now. This was the difference between inanimate objects and people: people change.
Loose change still sat on the counter. Mixed in with the quarters, nickels, and pennies, there was a half roll of breath mints whose wrapping paper trailed off, and a number of matchbooks. She zeroed in on these. They were black, every one of them. Three shone with gloss and might have been new. Another was creased and weathered. The lid on the final book would not shut, and Lorraine saw that all the matches had been torn from its left side. Examining another book, she again found its matches torn from the left side. Embossed letters on the lid. A gentlemen's club on Industrial. Lorraine's first reaction was a pointed anger. But this soon faded; it made perfect sense for Lincoln to frequent strip clubs.
Still it was painful.
Disappointment grew as she thought about it—not because the husband she had spurned for almost a year had found other forms of entertainment; rather, Lorraine's disappointment was rooted in the fact that during the course of her adult life, this man had been her best friend, the lover she'd desired most, her most intimate confidant, the man she could not have more proudly called the father of her child. Even now she was sure that Lincoln was not a bad guy, far from it; he was a decent person, a man whose only guiding principles had been to do what he felt was the best thing for his wife and his family. No. Lorraine's disappointment came with the realization that this had been the case all along, but she had been so firmly ensconced in her own pain that she had not been alert to his suffering. By all rights the discovery of those matchbooks in her son's room should have been shocking; but their existence felt as logical as anything did to Lorraine these days, and this was as disappointing as anything she had to deal with.
Still, she could accept what her marriage had come to, so long as she believed her child was alive. And she was sure this was so. A mother knows. She could shut her eyes and envision the morgue and the sheet being pulled back on her son's body. She could see herself looking down at his blue-white skin and his dead stare. Hundreds of scenarios visited her, gruesome thoughts tormented her, and yet none took hold inside her heart. None of them resonated as true. The phone had rung on her birthday, hadn't it? Newell was alive and out in the world, of this his mother was sure. She wondered how much he had grow
n, suddenly worried that he needed clothes, and had a strange thought about the obsolescence of his wardrobe in the closet. She hoped he was warm and healthy and had food to eat. Volunteer work had given her some understanding of what possible lives he might be leading, but it was nearly impossible for Lorraine to align the grime and pain of a life on the street with the child that she had brought into this world.
How could that life be preferable to what they had given him?
Into the universe she once again gave a primal, guttural prayer, praying that caring people in a shelter had gotten him, that her son had found safety, established a new life for himself, something with some modicum of order and comfort, this even as she tried to imagine why, if his life had this comfort, he would not contact his mother.
Not for a second did she believe he had been a troubled child.
Not for a second did she believe that he had been unhappy—not in a manner that was anything more than transitory.
There was no understanding. There were no hows, no whys, no logic, no answers. There was only numbness. Exhaustion. The absurdity of this life she was in.
It was well after midnight when Lincoln got home. Lorraine heard his car pull up. By the time he opened the front door, she was downstairs, waiting. She saw he was tired, and a little disoriented, surprised to see her.
She went to him and he said “Hey,” and he wrapped his arms around her and held her. “What is it? What?”
She did not answer but let him hold her and inhaled the smell of nicotine on his clothes. The stench of alcohol on his breath.
And something else.
“Lorraine?”
“The day. I, it just—”
Perfume. All over him.
The embrace ended, Lorraine removing herself, stepping back.
“There's been a mistake with the appetizers,” she said. “We were supposed to have grilled shrimp with spicy cocktail sauce. But it looks like there was a misprint or something. Midge, the banquet planner. She left all these messages.”
“Okay?”
“Shrimp's not part of the seventy-five-dollar menu. We can still have it but we'll have to pay.”
“That doesn't sound so serious.”
“It's forty dollars a dozen.”
He seemed to exhale now, eyeing her with a bit of suspicion.
“Right now we're fine,” she said. “We've got marinated chicken kebobs and grilled vegetable kebobs. Also these flame-roasted red peppers and smoked provolone. They're served on fresh baguettes with olive oil, they're supposed to be delicious. And there's going to be vegetable and cheese trays all around. So we can go with that. God knows there's enough other things to worry about—”
“Lorraine—?”
“But I'm telling you, Link, I was really tempted to pay for the upgrade out of our pocket, just to spite them, just to stick it to them, you know? Then we'd have the shrimp. We'd have a better cut of prime rib. I really was about to do it. And then, then I thought, It's a fund-raiser for teenagers living on the street.
“We're going to give these people all this food,” she said, “and, and, and meanwhile—”
Her husband took her to him and he held her head to his chest and stroked her hair as he used to do a long time ago. He told her it would all be fine.
“What are we doing?” Lorraine asked. “We have to let it go. We have to. But how, how do you do that?”
Lincoln held her, and kept holding her, and they sat at the base of the staircase. He waited for her crying to subside. “Hey there. Hey.” His words were slurred, a bit, but tender. She was smart to think like she did. They'd been to enough banquets. “You know how it is. You kind of assume the chicken's going to be rubber. The greens are always wilted. When we surprise them with all that fancy food, it'll knock their socks off.”
She blew her nose, and wondered if he was being nice because he was embarrassed about being caught drunk. If he felt guilty about cheating on her. If he still loved her and genuinely wanted to help. If all these things could be true.
“You'll see,” he said. “People get gourmet food and it makes them want to go to next year's banquet. They're happy to write a big check.”
“Next year?”
7.8
The glitz and glamour shrank behind them, having given way to cluttered hucksterism—a one-story storefront hawking plane rides to the Grand Canyon; a visitors’ information center where you could make show and hotel reservations. Now one of the most recognizable signs on the planet rose from a traffic median. Heading in this direction, you did not get welcomed to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. Instead, this side of the famed diamond read DRIVE CAREFULLY. COME BACK SOON.
Newell tightened his grip around the extinguisher's trigger mechanism. The undersides of his fingers dug into the clamp's serrated metal, and though he felt a stinging sensation, he kept squeezing.
On the other side of the street, an aboveground swimming pool sat in the courtyard of a motor lodge. The bottom of the pool was constructed out of see-through glass, and lights from inside made its water glow, and this was a momentary distraction for Newell.
The FBImobile approached an old motel and Newell held his breath. He remained breathless as the next motel went by—a split-level jobber, dilapidated, even in the night.
They weren't pulling into one of those seedy holes, but they sure weren't stopping, either. And the boy noticed the buildings becoming subsequently fewer, farther between. Cacti and tumbleweeds and dark emptiness filled the interim spaces. Behind that, the lights from nearby neighborhoods created this faint, spooky glow.
Ahead there was desert and more desert. The interstate. The mountains.
Suspense, thrilling and horrible, kept building with each second, the prospect of what could be happening, with all of its possibilities, presenting itself even as nothing happened.
Then Kenny went upright in his seat. His shoulder moved slightly.
“What's that?” he asked.
A clicked switch: the headlights became brighter, shining onto more of the asphalt in front of them, spilling onto the side of the road as well, catching the reflection of a mile marker; a bunch of gravel and brush; a sun-faded campaign placard. And something else. Up a ways.
“Dude,” Newell said, leaning forward now.
7.9
In the gloom of his forty-nine-dollar motel room, Bing Beiderbixxe stretched out on a mattress that provided nothing in the way of back support. Sitting up a bit, he let himself be propped by the headboard, as well as pillows whose cases were overly starched. Bing felt roundly and thoroughly defeated, humiliated for the umpteenth time. He'd been so certain that his connection with the stripper had been real. Yep. Bing Beiderbixxe was the sucker of all suckers.
A listless point of the remote control whose batteries needed to be replaced. He fought for each click through the channels of the motel's basic cable package. Time and again Bing returned to one of those movies that always ran on cable late at night, the kind of blockbuster that had been released with all kinds of publicity, and was now constantly shown to try to get back the studio's coin. Bing had seen it, or parts of it, during many predawn hours, and knew it well enough to not pay much attention. A passably bad movie, watchable and crafted but not particularly good.
He was noshing his way through a bag of guacamole Doritos, was also down to the dregs of yet another Mountain Dew Code Red. Exhausted but nowhere near sleeping, Bing was having halfhearted thoughts, and considered whether to grab his laptop, gather his scattered clothes off the floor. The crate of his unsold comic books was in the hatchback, right where he'd left them. Ditto the cardboard fold-out, stuffed into the backseat. All he had to do, really, was go to the Pinto and get going. No need for checkout. Who gave a crap about plastic room keys.
He was going to have to skip on his electricity bill this month. Probably MasterCard too, which would do wonders for the interest. Bing's eyes were strained, fading in and out of focus. His teeth were vibrating from the accumulated caffeine. Th
e thought of being back in Cali by morning wasn't any impetus for him to get up.
Without energy or enthusiasm he grabbed his laptop from off the stretch of bed on his right. The phone jack was still stuck into the side of the computer and soon Bing had typed in the code from his calling card, and bypassed the motel's phone charges. He logged in, checked the Knitting Room, and found there were no members inside. He vacillated, stared at the screen, and ran down his favorites menu. When he couldn't avoid it any longer, he opened a word processing file. Bing typed in a stream of consciousness, without bothering to read what he was entering, without correcting his errors, leaving alone phrases that he knew were false starts. It was more important to get it all out, get it down.
]A comic book about why grown people read comic books?
TOO VAGUE? 2 OVERDONE? 2 META? DO I NEED MORE SHAPE?
• Different characters have own reasons for being regulars at the comic book store. Group of f/college w/crappy jobs. Stripper who lives in dream world & think she's a movie star (remember trip! Sketch when u get home!). Each character MUST have some sort of DEFINING interest in popular culture—movies. rock & roll. Rap. Get rich schemes. Body art. Goth. Tecchie. UFOs. ETC.