by Habash, Gabe
I’m not going to go to Mary Beth’s apartment. She’s not there, she told me she was going home, and though I’ve considered getting inside and sleeping there alone, I won’t. We’ve spent the last three nights together, twice in my room and once in her’s, where she stayed up late reading while I slept, and then she woke me up to take my clothes off and kept finding ways to prolong our fooling around like letting me suck the mole on her upper back, and afterwards I fell asleep again with her rubbing my head. “You’re a physical person,” she said. She applies this cheap lip balm and when she’s close by I get full whiffs of it, which now drives me crazy. She’s one of two alive people who can make me feel less alone, but I’m not going to go find her, not even if it was realistic.
My dorm comes up out of the snow suddenly, at the end of the path. Fourteen total lights on. Snow mounding up at the bottom of the front door. In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, they redid the steps in the main staircase. When I started my second year, my muscle memory told me to pick my feet up at the former step level. But they redid them to be slightly taller, and I kept kicking my toes against them. I tripped up the steps for almost a week before I got them right. Why do I remember this and not my mom’s cigarette brand?
I cling to the one-percent chance she’s sitting against my door, waiting for me to come back.
But of course she’s not, the space in front of my door is empty, the entire floor is empty, she’s back with her family in Thief River Falls. Last year after Thanksgiving I did a thousand crunches and consumed a mild laxative, but this year feels different. The whole year feels like the end of the world.
The floor phone rings down the hallway, around the corner. My soaking shoes squeak on the tiles. I check Masha’s utility closet, but it’s locked.
I am more enthusiasm than talent, so what happens if my enthusiasm is taken away? I guess I could triple my weight and go to Japan and become a sumo. I could be fat in Tokyo, though I promised myself I’d never be fat.
I’m on my bed, and I’ve reopened the fingernail. Blood’s halfway down my finger. Rudy Unger dangles somewhere far away, dangling like a spider with his many bug arms wrapped around my money. Maybe I’ll get a place in a place with jobs and look for a job. Maybe I’ll ask him to give me all of it at once, I probably have enough to put it together for a flight and food for a few months. I am not poor or rich, at the moment I am afinancial. But I will not be rich when I graduate, though I could get on a plane for the first time and fly to a place where no one knows me, where I can make money off my body. I can sell my blood and semen. All the little countries in the big continents. I need to buy a map first, I’ll read up on which cultures really value things that look good, what jobs can be had for having a great body. I’m not above showing it for money. I’m not really above anything. I’ve heard there are sex shows all over now, including the Netherlands, which would suit me fine since they accept suicide there, so if I ever got tired of playing with myself in front of a crowd I could just be done with the whole thing.
I stare at the far wall, the far wall of the room I’ve lived in for four years. Small gut smudges are all over it from where I’ve mushed the bugs. No one else knows how full of gnats the building gets in the summer when I’m the only one here, under practice regimen while everyone else is away, and the school years come around again and the building fills, but they all still come and go, and I stay the same. What am I going to do? Less than six months until I have no plan left.
A knock on my door. “Hey, Stephen, you in there?”
I go to the door and open it. “Perry, what are you doing here?”
“I live here, jackass.”
“It’s Thanksgiving.”
“I know what day it is,” he says. “The phone’s for you.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know, it’s a woman.”
“A woman?”
“She’s been calling back every hour. She told me to pick up when you came back. I heard the door and figured it was you.”
I jog down the hall, hearing Mary Beth’s voice already, thinking that if she asked me to come to Thief River Falls by foot, I would do it.
I put the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Honey, this is your Aunt Lorraine.”
It isn’t Mary Beth’s voice. It’s a woman’s voice, but it’s not Mary Beth’s or anyone else’s. It’s older, calling from somewhere much farther away than Minnesota. Something I don’t have a name for gums up in my chest.
I say, “Can I help you?”
“Hello? Can you hear me, honey?”
I have given no special thoughts to my Aunt Lorraine. I have not thought of her since I got to Oregsburg. Standing in my hallway, it’s impossible for me to imagine her walking around and living in the world except as unrelated to me, the same as I’d imagine a stranger in Brazil or Madagascar. With some work, I bring up her face. She has just now appeared, stepping back into her skin and blood, resuming a placeholder, as if suddenly popping up found after being missing, Amelia Earhart swimming out of the ocean and waving her arms, “Here I am!” upping the planet’s population by one. Attached earlobes, I somehow remember that. Hair that didn’t get to her shoulders. I guess she has the same eyes as her brother, my dad, my dad’s eyes were probably the same as hers. She moved all the time, cutting up her life into bits like food for a child, stopping by once or twice a year to sleep on the couch, snoring with a sleep mask. Until she flew out of America, and then she stopped passing through. And that was that. She never had a husband, I don’t think she wanted one. That was her.
“Are you there?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s your Aunt Lorraine.”
To my surprise, I discover I’m already prepared to make anything up that I need to. What do I have to lose? I listen to her voice, and though the tentacles connecting her life to mine were always weak, her voice drops pieces of familiarity through the phone and into my ear, pieces that hollow out my head and remind me that I’m inside a very big building and that the world is very large.
I say, “How do you spell my first name?”
“With a v, Steven, honey, a v.”
“What’s my last name? My real last name?”
“Forster, dear, same as mine.”
“What’s my name?”
“What? Steven Forster. Honey, why—”
“Do you have identification?”
When they told me my parents were dead, I screamed for ten minutes. There was no one left for me to say I’m sorry to, to take the apology that I needed to give.
“Steven, listen to me. I know you have a lot of questions, I wa—”
“Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”
“I was in Australia. I live here.”
“Not good enough. You’re still there?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she says. “That’s why I called.”
I’m hitting the phone against the wall. Please tell me what I’m supposed to do with all this? I try to hold on and catch up. I went to their co-funeral without any interest, I already knew how those things went. I noted without interest who was there and who wasn’t.
Sensing what’s on the other end, she says, “I’m sorry.” I don’t answer, and I think she clears her throat. At some point I’ve started squatting at the foot of the phone. Time passes, and it becomes clear that one I’m sorry is all I get.
One time, I waited in a car with an adult woman who was not my mom. Rain all over. I was in the passenger seat. The wipers weren’t going and I was watching the mess the rain was making on the windshield. The radio was on, a man’s voice on talk radio, his words just vowel sounds now in memory, but I remember the voice sounding like a phone voice, like it was talking straight to me and the woman I can’t remember who was next to me. We were waiting in the rain for whatever we were waiting for and I think that was Aunt Lorraine. My mom and dad didn’t have any other siblings. And then all these years la
ter, on Thanksgiving night, the phone rings in my dorm, and it could’ve been anyone but it was my Aunt Lorraine.
“It’s all right,” I say. I wrap the coils of the phone cord twice around my hand. The one time I went into Aunt Lorraine’s apartment, she had a few items of food in her fridge, but nothing to drink, and I asked her what she drank, and she said water from the tap, except for when they’re doing building work and the water’s rusty, and I said, then what happens? and she said I don’t know. Aunt Lorraine didn’t have enough furniture in her very clean apartment, but when I opened her closet it was stuffed to the ceiling. My mom said she was “the type of person who throws out a towel after one use.” How could I refuse a phone call from my aunt? How could I not listen to what she has to say? I’m prepared to accept these terms.
“I made a mistake with you. I’m a terrible person and there’s no reason why you should ever want to speak to me again,” she says. “But I’m your aunt. Nothing that’s happened and no stupid thing I’ve done can change that. I’m the only one who knew your dad when he was a baby. I saw him when your mom was pregnant with you. I never saw him happier. He was always next to your mom, asking if she needed anything. He must’ve asked her a million times a day. I remember how much wrestling meant to you. You must’ve been ten or eleven the last time I saw you wrestle. I’m sure you’re on the team at your school?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. You used to wear your headgear to the table. You wouldn’t take it off.” She laughs. “You’ll have to forgive me if I sound nervous! I have butterflies. I’ve been thinking about this phone call for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Longer than you think,” she says.
I haven’t heard her voice in ten years, so I have nothing to recognize. I say, “You don’t have an Australian accent.”
“Of course not, honey, I’m American.”
“Yes but don’t people who go to foreign countries for a long time start having that country’s accent?”
“Sometimes, yes. But not me.”
“Why are you calling now?”
“Steven, listen. When’s your next match?”
“My next match is in nine days.”
“Next Saturday?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to come to it.”
“You’re going to leave Australia and come to North Dakota? In a week?”
“Yes.” She is talking fast, and how am I supposed to not get more and more excited as she goes? “I quit my job. Well, I’m going to relocate. I’m going to try to wrap some things up. I think I have a connection there. In Carrington, you know where that is? It’s an hour drive away, but I’m going to get a house with a bedroom in it that I’m going to keep for you. I’ll come pick you up. I’ll see you whenever you like. You’ll have a place to stay. We can spend Christmas together.”
“You’re going to come to my match? Next weekend?”
“I’m going to come to all of your matches. You can come for the weekends. Bring a bag of your clothes and I’ll do your laundry at the house,” she says. “Isn’t that what college kids are supposed to do?”
The sister of my dad, seeing the place where I live and sleep, positively crying her eyes out at this small room. Buying new shoes for me, trips to the dentist, sending me back to school for the week with leftovers in Tupperware. The logistical specifics become runny and surreal. It’s difficult to imagine them, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t already accepted them. The imagination is allowed to fail once in a while.
“Steven?”
Maybe she drives me to Fort Mandan, Fort Union Trading Post, the aquarium. Maybe she meets Linus and Mary Beth, maybe she’s there in the bleachers.
“Have you talked to Rudy?” I say.
“Rudy?”
“The estate lawyer.”
“Oh, him. No, I haven’t. Steven, I think there’s plenty of time for all that. I want to meet your friends, hear about your classes, hear about your life. I want to help give you a normal life. But first I want to watch you wrestle next Saturday. How does that sound?”
“It sounds good.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to see you! Tell me about yourself.”
It takes considerable effort not to spit it all out: Linus, Mary Beth, that I haven’t lost yet, the Frogman letter, the remote house on fire, the murderer living inside it, Kryger, Fink, how different I feel now compared to how I felt one minute before the phone rang. But I don’t. I just say, “I’ve gotten a few A’s here. A-minuses, I mean. Intro to Religious Studies and also Arthurian Romance.”
“I’m really very impressed.”
“Next week I have my final in Meteorology. That’s probably going to be my hardest. The week after, after you’re here, I have What Is Nothing? and Basic News Writing, but those shouldn’t be too bad.”
“Good. That makes me happy. That would’ve made your dad and mom happy, to know how hard you’re working. I’m going to be there in nine days. Would it be all right if I called you one more time? Wednesday? I just want to be able to talk to you one more time before I get on the plane.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been alone, too. I’ve made a mess of a lot of things in my life. But I’m not going to do that anymore. You and I don’t have to be alone anymore. I’m going to go now, but I’ll call you on Wednesday. O.K.?”
“O.K., Aunt Lorraine.”
“I’m going to hang up now. I love you.”
The vortex is both inside and outside myself.
“I’ll need you to tell me you love me, Steven.” Her voice is suddenly aggressive. “I’ll need to hear it.”
“I love you.”
“Great, I love you, too. Good-bye, Steven.”
“Good-bye.”
I AM IN THE GYMNASIUM. This is true. I haven’t put anything in my body since Thursday, I haven’t needed to. I came here three hours before the start, two hours before the rest of the team. All true. I knocked on Linus’s door this morning and he came with me. We walked down the main path, no birds making any noise, our feet crackling on the ice. We did crunches with four layers on and sat in adjacent stalls of the bathroom with our hoods up, barely talking, because the bathroom gets a direct feed from the boiler room. On the other side of the divider, spitting and panting, he said, “Are you O.K.?” And I said, “Someone’s coming to watch me.”
Weigh-in has already happened. I was lower than I’ve ever been, 130.3, and got some looks until I told them I wasn’t trying to cut down a class. They’ve disinfected the mats, the bleachers are as full as they will be. Mary Beth sits at the end of the first row, she told me she wants to hear all the noises that I make. For ten minutes, I sat next to her and she held my hand, she asked me how the Meteorology test went, and it was the first time I felt like someone other than Linus wanted me to win. When I came back to the team at the side of the mats, Linus was wiggling his eyebrows at me.
Joseph Carver and I have seen each other. Normally, there’s a feeling of reality becoming reality, of actualization, when you see your person beforehand. It’s a feeling of ownership and responsibility. I try to work up my standard feelings, ignoring this time’s obvious differences because I’m good at being blind to the facts, and I start by picturing what Joseph Carver slept in, how good he slept. This is a conference dual, against nearby Konstantin College, so I picture the twenty minutes it took him to get from there to OC on the highway. Even though I was out of my room by the time it happened, I like to imagine my window, and in the distance his vehicle going by, coming closer. I see in the program that he’s 4–1, that he majors in art therapy, and I feel high fondness for him.
But as the first match starts and mine gets nearer, and I don’t see Aunt Lorraine anywhere, I hear what she said on the second phone call over and over. I was sitting down in the hallway next to the phone and it was the following night in Australia, very late. She was different the second time from the first. It sounded like she was in a quieter room, and she talked a lot
softer and slower, almost like she was lying down. Whatever butterflies she had the first time were gone.
“I get so lonely out here, Steven.”
She told me she would recognize me, that it hasn’t been so long that I won’t recognize my aunt. After a series of transfers, her plane was supposed to land in the late morning, about the time I was sweating in the bathroom. She promised me she’d be here by the time my match started.
I keep watching the bleachers, and then I sense Mary Beth looking back at me, and so I move my eyes to her, make her think I was looking at her all along. It is in the nature of the stupid young man to think he is contributing to the conversation on mortality, or identity, or anything, but he is not. This is something he realizes long after the fact, if he is lucky.
My draw comes second to last. Linus gets third to last. Sherman wins. Whitey loses. Harry squeezes a cup of applesauce into his mouth. Kryger and Fink seem to be talking about something. My match is going to start in fifteen minutes. I make eye contact with Joseph Carver one last time before leaving the gym, and he smiles.
I choose the most private spot, the weight room, a tiled hallway and then a perpendicular second tiled hallway away from the gym. The backup lights are on, the ones that go when no one’s inside. Mirrors are everywhere in here, I can see my butt simultaneous as my chest without craning my neck or anything. My head shines. I spit on the rubber floor. I love this time of year. I’ve got to cut this short, I’ve got to be out there for Linus. Got to be out there for the matches! I hold Joseph Carver’s face in my head. For God’s sake, please challenge me. I force myself to remember the puffy palm skin of Mary Beth’s right hand, how she let me compare it to her left hand, and how she pinched the tiny barbell calluses at the bottoms of all my eight non-thumb fingers. “This little Florida went to Oregsburg … this little Florida loved going to Drawing … this little Florida loved listening to Mary Beth pretend his fingers were all Floridas … this little Florida knew in its little Florida heart that Mary Beth could pin him, pin him down if she really wanted to.”