by Owen Egerton
Milton yanked. The top of the pole budged.
“Stop! Don’t move!” his father yelled. “You try and save me, and you could leave me a brain-dead fuck for the years to come. So don’t touch anything, okay?”
Milton continued pulling at the pole.
“It’s going to go again! Click or bang, click or bang. It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“Dad, I’m stopping this! Now!”
“This is what the best of us do. We do what others won’t do. Because they don’t believe their own math, Milton. They believe shit! I believe, Milton! If those fucking Floaters can do it, so can I. I’ll spat all existence. I’ll spat my way back and forth. Trust me.”
The pole snapped from the ceiling. Milton yanked it back, guiding the cuff up and slipping it off the top.
“Stop, Milton! Saving me is a sure way to damn me.”
Once the cuff was free, Milton charged his father. He heard the crack of the gunshot the instant before he plowed into him, tackling him to the floor. The sound of the shot reverberated through the room like trapped thunder.
Milton lay on top of his father, cheek to cheek. For a moment he refused to move, refused to examine his father’s face. But the blood pooling on the basement floor told him what he would find. Finally, Milton lifted himself. His father’s open eyes were wide and dilated. On his forehead, a large hole gaped where the black X had been.
4,365
DAYS
Like a dog can sense earthquakes
“WHEN YOU SING, my God, it’s fire,” Hayden said, spinning the ice in his whiskey backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards. “You are a shoo-in!”
The pop starlet smiled, teeth so white they buzzed. Crew members with tiny black headsets and celebrities of every level bustled about them. But Hayden kept his focus on the starlet.
“I see you on that hospital show,” she said with a singsong Georgia accent. “You’re good.”
“Thanks,” Hayden shrugged. “I prefer film. But the writing on that show just grabs me. My agent said, ‘Don’t do it. It’s just TV.’ I told him I had to do it.”
She sipped her fruit juice and giggled. “I’m nervous! Do you already have the envelope?”
“I do,” he said, patting his pocket. “But it’s sealed.”
“Can I convince you to let me peek?” she said. At twenty-one she was four years his senior and she was beautiful, radiating that brief, crumbling innocence America loves so much. But Hayden felt no intimidation.
“Listen, I don’t care what this envelope says. Right now, I’m talking with the world’s hottest singer with the year’s best video.”
A crew member patted Hayden’s arm. “Mr. Brock, you’re on in twenty seconds.”
Hayden downed the last of his drink and handed the glass to the crew member.
“By the way,” he said to the starlet, as he ruffled his already ruffled hair. “Consider joining me for a midnight dinner after this circus closes up.”
“Midnight dinner?”
“Room service goes till 2:00 AM.”
She smiled.
Hayden turned toward the stage. He knew if she won, he’d have no chance with her that night. He also knew, thanks to the unsealed envelope in his pocket, that she would not win. Hayden could sense status like a dog can sense earthquakes. Her star was on the decline and his was on the rise. Tonight they momentarily shared an elevation, and he intended to exploit it.
He stepped out onto the stage, the brilliant lights hiding the cheering crowd. He smiled into the cameras and flicked his chin at the unseen audience. He moved toward the podium feeling not so much that he was walking but that he was lifting his feet and the world passed beneath him.
A little over half his height
MILTON WEAVED THROUGH the sprawling University of Texas campus, a cedarscented maze of stone buildings, bronze-green statues, and looming pecan trees, each branch heavy with black-feathered grackles perched and heckling the students below. Crowds of students squeezed together on the pebbled walkways. Milton—lanky, acne-plagued, and too shy even to talk to himself—avoided any eye contact or verbal interaction. But he couldn’t dodge the smell. An olfactory orchestra of perfumes, body sprays, and hygiene levels. The eager sweat of late adolescent boys, the patchouli and morning pot of art students, the sweet apple smell of well-crafted blondes labeled with Greek script and careful smiles.
Milton studied the map, but it was these others—these close bodies—that pinpointed Milton’s true location. He was out of place. His too-new shoes, his bang-heavy hair, his dangling arms and thin shoulders. His everything. He tried denying his presence, holding his breath and floating through like a ghost. But it was no use. He was, and he was wrong.
Milton had applied to the university and moved into the dorm simply because it was the path of least resistance. When the paperwork asked him to declare a major, he penciled in Physics and wondered why. He despised math, had no inclination toward the concepts. He liked astronomy—watching spheres spin a billion miles away. He loved music. But there it was, written in his scrawl: physics. And he did not change it.
He stepped from the sunlight into a high-ceilinged lecture hall, the August heat colliding with the frigid air like two weather fronts ready to birth thunder. He sat quickly, near the back, but not the very back. The back row was making as much of a statement as the front row, and Milton wanted to make no statement at all. To be stateless, that was his aim.
He was early, the hall spotted with only a few other students. Although he had arrived at what was his last class of the day, Milton kept his eyes on the campus map, pretending to study its markings.
Finally a middle-aged Indian man in a cheap suit walked to the front of the hall shuffling papers and beginning a scripted lecture on the Introduction to Physics. Another student might have begrudged the size of the hall, the student-to-professor ratio, the lecture-heavy pedagogy. But Milton took refuge in the anonymity. He breathed easy for the first time that day. That’s when the seat next to him was filled. A small man, a little over half his height, plonked down.
“Jesus, this place! I’ve known D&D worlds with less crannies, huh?” the small man whispered a few decibels above quiet.
He spoke with such a familiarity that Milton glanced to see if he was some forgotten friend. No. A stranger. A loud, short stranger.
“This is Physics, right?” As he whispered, the small man chewed on the end of his pencil as if it were a Slim Jim. “Don’t let me waste an hour in Victorian Literature or History of the Turnip or something!”
Milton didn’t like him. He was bouncing words, looks, even questions off of Milton, exposing him like flour thrown over the Invisible Man. Milton ignored him.
“I can’t understand a thing this guy is saying, it’s like—” The man made a funny noise, a gurgled cough.
But Milton refused to look. True, the professor mumbled horribly. Milton hadn’t deciphered more than a phrase or two of the lecture. But mocking the professor on his first day of classes was just foolhardy.
Another wet, weird cough. But Milton kept his focus on the professor. Now the little guy was banging a fist against his desk. Really hamming it up. People were turning in their seats, even the professor was faltering in his speech and shooting glances in their direction. Milton could feel the blood rush to his face. A hand grabbed Milton’s shoulder. Shit, the little man is crazy! He’s going to shoot me in the head, look at him, all blue and pointing at his throat waving a pencil with no eraser and—
Oh!
Milton was not wild about touching people. Not at all. But there was no time. He jumped to his feet and wrapped his arms around the small man’s waist. The hall of students, the professor, the Greek blondes, all watching as Milton dryhumped the tiny man like a Great Dane asserting dominance over a Lhasa Apso.
Pop. Out of man’s mouth shot something that resembled a detached nipple. The eraser landed four rows in front of Milton in the lap of a pretty brunette. Milton and the little man both suc
ked in deep breaths. Faces stared, confused and startled. The little man turned to Milton and released a loud, astonished guffaw. He turned to the staring faces of the class and announced in a booming voice, “This man saved my life!” He turned to Milton and stuck out his hand. “My mother died of choking. An apple,” he said, grinning. “My name’s Roy.”
763
DAYS
Too much want
“SOUP,” DANTE TOLD her, “knows everything about the person preparing it. You can lie to friends, family, even your lover.” He grinned at her. “But you can never lie to soup. Not without ruining it. Hand me the cumin, would you?”
Rica smiled. “Seems a little over-the-top.” She handed him the spice.
“If you want your soup to be over-the-top, then your approach must be over-the-top.” He threw a dash of cumin into the cauldron.
Dante was known to the people of Austin, Texas, as the Soup Guru. He was a chef at a midsize bistro on South Congress. Each Monday after the restaurant closed, he would cook vats of soup. Tuesday morning he bicycled from house to house, delivering Tupperware containers to friends and willing neighbors.
Soon word of Dante’s soup spread. He became something of a folk hero in south Austin. You’d see him bicycling along the shaded streets, pulling an icecooler on a cart behind him. People would call out to him, “Keep it up, Soup Guru!” or “The peanut stew was delicious.” He would smile and wave, call out a thank-you or a greeting to a friend. But he didn’t stop pedaling. Dante was on a mission. He was bringing nourishment to the hungry, hope to the downtrodden, soup to those who have no soup.
Rica became his lover before becoming his student. And in her more honest moments, she had to admit, the attraction was more to the soup than the man. Not that Dante wasn’t handsome; he was—bright, laughing eyes; dark, happy curls; and the lean body of a cyclist. The humiliating truth was that Rica could not give her heart to Dante, or anyone. She had left her heart in the hands of a boy she had shared a dark closet with well over a decade before. A boy who, she was sure, remembered her only as a volcano of stomach fluids.
Dante was a friend and mentor whom she occasionally slept with. It was the soup and the process of preparation that moved Rica. She watched him. He watched the soup.
Rica was already becoming an accomplished soup crafter, but Dante was a master. She pursued her craft at Mundi House, a café on the east side of Austin. But Monday nights, she joined Dante in south Austin for his after-hours culinary ventures.
Hours after the busboys and dishwashers left for home, she would stand by Dante’s side in the quiet kitchen, handing each ingredient he called for like a nurse handing scalpels to a surgeon. Dante hovered over the stove, adding a dash of this, a spoonful of that, cooking with the intensity of an atomic engineer and the flamboyance of an abstract artist.
“Yes! Yes!” he’d yell, his eyes closed and his nostrils flaring. “Cloves! I need four cloves!” or “Turn on more lights. My soup needs light!”
Tonight—morning, actually, it was nearly 3:00 AM—Rica was helping him create his acclaimed twig-mushroom-beer soup. The South Congress restaurant was dark and still, except for the kitchen glowing white in the heart of the building.
“Don’t expect anything not to flavor soup. Including spoons and dishware.” He poured in another bottle of Bass ale. “Bottles of beer work better than cans. The aluminum adds an unwanted casualness to the flavor.” He snapped four long twigs of oak into the near-boiling stew. “And now we wait,” he said, stepping back and clapping his hands. “We’ll let it simmer for three hours.”
“That’s all?” Rica asked.
“There is one more step in the recipe. But it’s more of a spiritual ingredient,” Dante said, locking Rica in his gaze. “Soup is like a plant or a child. It absorbs the energy of its surroundings. A sad man makes a sad soup.”
“Are you sad, Dante?” she asked, touching her chin with her fingers.
“No, I’m fine. That was just an example.” He stepped closer. “But this kitchen is cold. There is a hollowness here.” He placed a hand on Rica’s cheek. “Rica, help me make soup.” He leaned in and placed his lips to hers, not kissing, just touching. Rica smiled and breathed in the aroma of boiling beer.
Dante made love liked he cooked. An acute attention to detail, carefully adding just the right pinch and touch. Dazzlingly patient, giving heat its transformative time, understanding that it is not only a question of ingredients but how the ingredients are added. An hour of delicate work and Dante had prepared the most succulent orgasm of Rica’s life. She dropped into nearly unconscious sleep, nestled into Dante’s shoulder.
Two dreamless hours later she opened her eyes to see a naked Dante sipping the twig-mushroom-beer soup and shaking his head.
“Good morning,” she said, smiling from the floor.
“No, not good. The soup is not right.” He dropped the spoon. It clanged against the metal counter. “It was the lovemaking. Something was wrong with the lovemaking.”
Rica stood up and stretched. “It felt right to me.” She wrapped her arms around his chest and kissed his neck.
“No. No. Too much want,” Dante said, turning to her. “You should leave now.”
She stepped back, her skin bristling. “What?”
“It’s no good, you and me. You’re just too . . . needy.”
“Needy?”
Dante turned back to the stove. “It’s all in the soup.”
Her throat tightened, a dozen retaliations buzzing in her head. But she said nothing. What annoyed her the most was that she didn’t love Dante. She admired him, enjoyed him, but she did not love him. And yet here he was breaking her heart.
“Sorry if that was sudden,” Dante said, reaching for the salt. “Breakups are hard.”
“Someday, Dante,” she said in a slow, steady voice, “someday, could be any day, I’m going to find a way to piss in your soup.”
He didn’t turn to her, but Dante’s back tensed and Rica knew that with those simple words she had added a piss-laced drop of doubt to every soup Dante would ever sip. That was revenge enough. She collected her clothes from the kitchen floor and left.
The sun was rising on what she knew would be a long, slow death of a day. Rica had no time to go home after leaving Dante. She finished dressing in the car and sped to work at Mundi House. She gathered plates, prepared food, hardly noticing a thing. People came and went, but she had no words for anyone. She made a pumpkin curry soup that day. It tasted bitter. People left half-filled bowls on their tables.
Jeppy, the ever-smiling owner of Mundi House, offered to let Rica go home early, but Rica found the prospect of an empty apartment too depressing to consider. She passed the day making coffee and yerba matés and lying “Fine” to every customer’s “How are you?”
That night Jeppy projected a film on the outside wall of Mundi House. People from the neighborhood arrived at dusk with blankets and children. Conversations paused, customers walked outside to sit on the warm grass and watch. Jeppy passed around roasted pumpkin seeds.
Rica sat a little farther back and tried to watch. It was some old black-and-white film that Rica had never seen. She wanted the film to be louder and larger, to fill her head and crowd everything else out. But the wall was only so big, and people were sleeping not too far away.
The film was a noir mystery. Someone was betraying someone. Someone else was finding out. Someone was angry. Someone was cruel. Rica breathed. She watched, and that was fine. No one was talking to her. No one was looking at her. That was a relief.
Halfway into the film a city switch box blew and all the lights for blocks snapped out. It was dark. No moon. For a moment Rica was worried people would begin moving, talking, leaving. But then stars crept closer and into view. The small crowd lay back and stargazed. It was quiet.
“Some of those stars weren’t there yesterday,” a child whispered to his father. “They’re new.”
“They’re not new. We just didn’t see them,
” the father answered.
“A star is always new,” another voice said. Loud enough to hear, but soft enough to preserve the mood. “It’s the nature of stars to be new. A constant generation of energy. Never the same burn twice. That is until the mass falls below .05 solar masses and we lose the star. Tonight the dwarf nova SS Cygni reaches its high magnitude. It spins around a white dwarf. The two will never touch and will never leave each other. Can you see it?”
“The bright one?” someone asked.
“No, that’s Venus. Farther east.”
Rica watched the sky as he spoke.
Someone asked another question and he answered, his voice quiet and full. “Stars explode and matter is produced. Energy is incarnated. Our planet and our bodies are likely the aftermath of a dead star. And our star will die, too.”
Rica held her breath. He spoke of red supergiants and novas and the resident stars of Orion’s Belt. Rica knew very little about the sky. For her it was as if the voice were creating the stars as he named them.
“Sirius, Vega, Algol, WR 104. There’s seventy sextillion stars. That’s ten stars for every grain of sand on Earth. Each one an oven.”
Rica could not see his face, just hear his voice as it explained black holes and light years. Children oohed, parents ummed, Rica cried. It was a surprise, those wet cheeks as the voice explained the terrible gravitational pull of black holes and flower petals of a spinning galaxy. She was pulled from herself, from her hurt, and was gratefully lost in the larger wonder.
“We’re watching from inside the canvas,” he said. “We’re a part of someone else’s constellation. And the painting isn’t finished. You see new brushstrokes every night.” And as if the universe were taking its cue from him, a shooting star streaked light across the sky.
For a moment no one said a word. Then the electric lights cracked back on and the crowd sighed. Now the streetlights and electric hum felt inappropriate, even crude. Rica looked to see who had been speaking and for the first time laid eyes on Milton. He was now staring into his maté gourd, his shoulders moving inward. He was shrinking from the light, a slow implosion. Someone patted his back. He nodded and shyly smiled, but returned his eyes to his gourd. Rica bit her lip.