by Habash, Gabe
A letter arrives from Mary Beth. In order to prolong the feeling, I put the envelope on my bed, lock the door behind me, and shower, the whole time thinking about what’s inside, or not thinking about what’s inside but just that I have something from her. The gun seems goofy and pointless when I think about her letter, and I start laughing in the shower. Back in my room, dripping wet in my towel, I start reading the note, which is scribbled on a small torn corner of sketchbook paper.
I started something and it ended up looking a little like you. It didn’t start that way. I just wanted you to know. I’m not going to let you see it, I just wanted to let you know. It’s really good.
I want to tell her it’s strange to be talking with someone like this. It’s strange for me. My natural progression with people is to move further and further apart. So even this, whatever this is, is new for me. I reread the note, over and over.
The picturesque thing to do would be to stand at the edge of Egg Lake and throw that tiny fucker as hard as I can, admiring my throw as it lands with a small splash and sinks somewhere in the middle. But the lake is frozen. So I step onto the ice and walk toward the center, where I spot a fresh ice-fishing hole. I drop in the gun and head back home in the dark.
During Monday’s Jazz class, I listen to Ornette Coleman and try to convince myself this isn’t music’s diarrhea. My distraction is thick enough that I can’t give as much attention as I’d like to studying Silas, the flimflam man. Melancholy is a term I learned about in my reading and I’ve discovered it can be wildly addictive to nurse one’s own melancholy, needless to say.
A wadded-up piece of paper hits my shoulder, bounces onto my notebook. I open it while Silas, his feet up on the desk, looks at the ceiling, Zenning the fuck out to the saxophone solo.
I swear to god this shit is so boring Im dying
And then a little below in a different handwriting:
1- Im so bored 2 did u see me picking my nose
2- Is it gross I want to fuck a murderer
So while the saxophone continues to burp and toot, I think up something to add to the paper. At last I write:
Ha me 2 my fingers up my butt
I crumple the paper back up and toss it over my shoulder, far toward the back of the room, putting my head down for the rest of the song to hide my laughing.
The song finishes and like always, Silas doesn’t say anything for a full minute. I know it’s a minute exactly because I’ve counted it and now I know he counts, too.
“John Coltrane died in 1967 on Long Island,” he tells everyone. “Anyone know what he died of?”
Being closest to the front, I don’t know if anyone’s shaking their head or what, but he lets the silence last a while.
“Hepatitis. Anyone know how someone gets hepatitis?”
Another long silence, this time, one he doesn’t finish. He just walks out. Puts his papers away and takes his bag and leaves. I’m zipping up my backpack when something bounces around my feet, rolls up under my desk. Another note. This time it’s about me. What it says is:
That Stephen boy has a nice body but hes such a big weird freak
Suicidal behavior has been observed more in female animals than male and in more vertebrates than invertebrates.
Some kind of fair is in the student union on Tuesday afternoon. There are tables for the Army and the Merchant Marines and the Peace Corps and the Red Cross. I take their pamphlets, all of them. I look for sign-ups for human test subjects but there’s nothing. I could join any one of these in a few months. On the television, a Save the Children ad comes on and really gets me down about what I take for granted on a day-to-day basis. On the back of the blood-donation pamphlet, I write down the address they have on the screen, under the white woman and the phone number.
Hours and hours of sitting in the library, sifting through the poetry section, I’ve figured out which is which, I’ve decoded the notebook. Thank God there are only two dozen poetry books in central North Dakota. I’ve figured out which is Dickinson, which is Berryman, which is Kafka, which is Blake. The remaining writings I am reasonably certain are Fink’s, and I’m now sure he used these exact books for his notes: there’s a sun with a face in the margin of the Berryman.
And it is with this scholarly burden on my mind that I travel from the library to the gym, so deep in thought, so pleasantly deep in thought, that I look forward to the workout as a means to stimulate the thoughts and turn up new angles on them, new considerations, which is after all what real thought is all about.
While walking down the gym’s dark hallway I hear a noise in the back of the training room. Then, faintly, I hear “Scarborough Fair” playing from behind the door, inside the COACH OFFICE. Standing next to the exam table in the unlit room, I wait to be certain I’m not imagining the sounds, to make sure they don’t go away. When they don’t and I head toward the door, I have a vision of the great yarn ball untangling.
I open the door on Fink and Linus and see what I see. I shut the door on them. I run out of the room and down the hall and outside and don’t stop until I’m up the stairs and in my room. I pace around. I sit down on the bed, and like a burning bush I see the secret, the biggest one yet, the soundless bottom of the well where concentration and certainty intersect, a place where the dodo and giant squid intersect.
The knock comes faster than expected.
“Can we talk?” Linus says. He has a bottle of water in one hand. In the other is a Stephen King book called ’Salem’s Lot.
I step aside as if to welcome him into the room he never visits anymore, the place where in September he sat at my desk and, though he is smart, smarter than me, he is shaky in English, so he said: “Roberts wants us to pick what we think is the most important line of poetry of the twentieth century and tell why,” and I said: “‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.’ Emerson,” and he said, “From Walden, right?” and I said, “Right,” and he said, “Great, let me write it here. O.K. What does it mean?”
But now in my doorway he says, “Someplace a little more neutral, I thought.”
“Neutral such as?”
“What about that closet you use?”
He lets me open the door and enter first because in this situation, the leverage is mine.
“I was hoping to straighten up, but you just caught me at a busy time,” I say, laughing at him, laughing right into his face. I feel like a king of infinite money.
Linus is cool like a lawyer, as if smothered by indifference and treating it as one of his weapons. “It’s pretty simple.” He takes a drink of water, prepares to offer me his bag of magic beans. “You forget the whole thing, Fink tells Hargraves you’re healthy again.”
“One hundred percent?”
“Yes.”
He appears more vivid in the closet, releasing more odor and sweat than ever before, it all keeps increasing and increasing. Above his lip, there are pimples where the hair is struggling through. I cannot shake the feeling that he’s the result of someone’s careful long-ago idea, a grown weed.
While looking at his bent nose, it occurs to me: Louise is Fink’s wife, the note in the locker room back in November was intended for Linus. Something needs to be done about Louise. I balled it up and dropped it on the ground. I thought nothing of it.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says.
“What.”
“Where’s Mary Beth?”
It’s all happening too fast. I slow events down with my thinking, the only way you can, I buy more time with a fake fit of coughing. I know what he is. I don’t know his exact pathology, no one does, but I know it’s a lot more complicated than the boy from Nebraska who went up to North Dakota and got gobbled up by evil. I know what I saw in that room, and I know he did not wrestle himself to 12–0 without something else inside him, anyone who has spent one minute watching him on a mat knows that.
“She had to go away.” He nods, peeling my personality back with his stare. Only th
e people who really know you can find where the rind gives, and I look away, my eyes falling on his book. “How’s that one?”
“Not far enough really to tell. Pretty good.”
“What have you been doing at the health center?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ll squeal! Don’t make me squeal!”
“Getting my anti-inflammatory.”
“What for?”
“Tendinitis.”
“Does Fink know?”
“Does Fink know? Of course Fink knows.”
“Is it bad? How bad is it?”
“Manageable,” he says. He puts on a big grin.
“Also, I want twenty dollars.”
“What?”
“I just want it. Give it to me.”
“I don’t know if I have it.”
“Go check your room. I’ll wait here.”
I wait in the closet, thinking it’s time to forgive him. I’ve been trying to wedge him into the bottle, to repair things between us, but it hasn’t worked and I don’t know why. He is my fucking son. As he moves away, his lineage is somehow reinforced, his snipped relation to me. It will take a simultaneous, matching movement and we won’t allow that to happen, never at the same time when it needs to. That I feel sympathy, that objectively he deserves my sympathy for what’s happened to him, just makes our decomposing friendship even more frustrating. We’ll never get it back. I turn to knock something off the shelf, but stop. All of Masha’s vanity products have disappeared. There’s no mirror, or lipstick, or nail polish, or anything.
Linus comes back, shutting the closet door behind him and dangling the bill. “Do you agree to the terms?” I try to snatch the money but he yanks it away, and so I put my hands on him and hold his wrist still with one hand and take the money with the other. He’s laughing, he’s all over the place, I try to hide my smiling from him. “Come on! Mend a fence. Bury a hatchet,” he says, and then takes a white napkin out of his pocket, waves it around.
“You tell Fink that I’m not going with the team to Wyoming tomorrow.”
“Tell him what?”
“Tell him I’m sick, tell him whatever you want, I don’t care. You also tell him to relay to Hargraves that I’m going to wrestle Kryger for 133 at Friday’s practice. Is that clear?”
“Yes.” I push past him and open the door. “And you’ll hold up your end of the bargain? I’ll need a promise.”
His hand is out. This is half penance, a half confession, like asking for forgiveness without saying what should be forgiven. I take it quickly, thinking about pulling it into the doorframe and slamming it closed, but I don’t.
“Good-bye!” He follows me to my room and I shut the door in his face. I turn on my desk lamp and sit down to write two letters.
First I put Linus’s money together with some of the money I have hidden under my papers and stuff the cash inside an envelope and make it out to Save the Children.
For the second, I don’t think much about it, just Mrs. Fink going to the mailbox and seeing an envelope addressed to her. For the ninth or tenth time, but this time the final draft, I start writing:
Dear Mrs. Fink,
I’m sure you’re a lovely woman. We’ve never had the pleasure of meeting. I have some I’m afraid rather troubling news regarding your husband Roland Fink and a student (or students) at Oregsburg College …
I seal them both up.
But it turns out I have no cause to send the second one. I don’t have to wait long at all to see how the situation resolves itself.
It’s not ever clear if it’s abuse or rape, whether it was wanted or unwanted, but Linus tells them it is. Of course, in the eyes of the law, this is only secondary to the fact that the act took place repeatedly when Linus was seventeen. And so the next morning, there are two police cars parked at the doors of the gym, and as I’m walking across the parking lot, two officers come out holding Fink’s arms. A third one is behind, watching. They put him in the back of a car and drive off, lights flashing but no siren. Shortly thereafter, the whole team comes out of the gym, including Hargraves. I duck behind a tree but no one sees me. They load up the vans and then drive away. When they’re gone, I go inside and do my business for three hours and at the end of it stand still under the exceedingly hot water in the shower.
I mail the other letter.
While we’re waiting for Silas to show up, a girl, a scatter of papers on her desk, turns around to ask the room, “Does anyone know what CEO stands for?”
I jump in and answer, “Chairman of the Entire Office,” and would you believe it, no one corrects me!
Silas enters, eyeballs the five of us as a mental form of taking attendance. It’s become custom not to expect Pervis.
He teaches us about Charlie Parker. He tells us his nickname was Bird. When he puts on “All the Things You Are,” my eyes get wet and I put my hand over my face to keep anyone from seeing.
In the afternoon, I go for a long run. Down at the end of a side road, where it turns into woods, there are two hunters without orange because it’s off-season, stalking woodcocks or doves or sage grouse. In one of the fields, there are four hundred women crying facedown.
A purple envelope with a hundred stamps on it arrives. The card inside says in blue bubble letters puffed out like balloons “Thank You” on the outside and “For Your Thoughtfulness” inside, and at the bottom it’s signed Love, Aunt Lorraine.
The news is on in the student union. A schoolteacher named Anna Michaels was shot in the face in the staircase of her apartment building. She survives. They find the man who did it just wandering around the building, a man with no connection to her at all, whose real name is Wilson Hyde, but he plays games with the police for a few hours, telling them his name is Joey Chandelier, and when he finally cooperates and they ask him for his statement about why he did it, there’s a big deal made about whether they can legally include his shrug in the official paperwork. Four days later, while the paper runs a picture of Anna, her entire head a ball of bandages, the man kills himself in his cell by swallowing a bundle of wire that takes two days to do its job. A woman from the American Association of Suicidology stands in front of a bunch of microphones and calls the whole thing a tragedy. Suicidology is a real word and the American Association of Suicidology is a real organization. The weapon, the TV says, was purchased recently from a local gun show.
That night, the phone rings. Someone picks it up, and a few seconds later there’s a knock on my door. It’s Perry.
“Phone.”
“Who is it?”
“He says he’s your coach.”
“Tell him I’m not here.”
“I’m not your goddamn secretary, tell him yourself.”
I walk down the hall to the phone and gently hang it up.
Bird and I called people we didn’t like Stinky Pete. One day, for unclear reasons, we called a spindly boy in our class Stinky Pete until a girl told us to stop, at which point we rerouted the name to her, until we were sent to the principal’s, who asked us if we’d lost our minds, and I remember this very distinctly, I pictured a basket being shaken so hard its apples tumbled out. And then Bird turned to me, nodded his head in the principal’s direction, and said, “That’s a grade-A Stinky Pete right there.”
I can see all the way to the end of the line. The path goes through Kryger, Jan Gehring, four matches at regionals (three if I can get a bye), four matches at the championship. I’ve got my mouth on the tailpipe of fate, sucking its incense. But one step at a time, as they say. I lick the salt off an unshelled sunflower seed from my spot in the middle of Unusual Disorders, the little bag open on my desk. I put the wet desalted shells back in the bag, sometimes cracking them when I visualize Kryger’s enthusiasm, how his enthusiasm can be used against him. I can’t help myself. Classwise, my attention wanes and falters, but in the last five minutes I run out of seeds and join the discourse, which is about a town in Colorado that established an ano
nymous public hotline where people could call in and they knew their calls would be recorded, and what they found when they played the tapes back were people either crying or stoic or nervous, confessing to all kinds of atrocious, unspeakable things they did in their pasts, things they couldn’t before let out of their mouths.
Life is mean and short, and I’m not letting go of the wind-up promise that I have access to the championship. I am not stupid, I’m not delusional, I’m aware of the smallness of the Division IV wrestling record book. But despite its smallness, it is still permanent, and I have in my hand the pen to sign my name into it. Right here. I’m not going to forget that. After I’m dead, from time to time, maybe someone will scan through the past results and come across my name.
Another abominable glorious month! Happy birthday, Grandma.
I get to the gym two hours ahead of time and sit at my old locker. Patience is in the room with me. Then they start to come in, smelling of Wyoming. It is not confidence, it’s certainty. In high school, when I took biology I was on top of it, when I was doing chemistry I could scrape by, but when I got to physics I could not manage, I could not learn the trajectory formulas and gravity examples. The point being: all the time, people everywhere go further and further in their capabilities, until finally they butt up against their limit. I have reached many limits, but I have not reached my limit in wrestling, I know that for certain.