American Dead

by PW Cooper

  He lay back, shut his eyes, and listened the quiet of the insects, to the stillness of the encroaching night. And he left himself far behind.

  * * *

  “So tell me, if you don't mind, why did you leave the Courier?” The man behind the desk steepled his fingers. The top button of his stained white undershirt was undone. A handful of minor academic accolades were proudly displayed on the temporary walls. There was a cheap looking nameplate on the edge of the desk: Thompson Greer.

  Nathan shrugged. “Downsizing. Streamlining. This and that. Print isn't... you know... it's not what it used to be.” There was a window down the hallway; Nathan could see cars moving slowly through the community college parking lot. “All the old things are dying out now... sad, really.”

  The other man stared at him. “Hm,” he said after a moment's consideration, then returned to his list of prepared questions.

  Nathan left the building an hour later with Thompson Greer's assurances that the paperwork would be in the mail by Friday. Nathan was going to be working as an adjunct English teacher. He would start in the Fall Semester. He wasn't particularly looking forward to it, but his options were limited.

  Adjunct. Just an accessory, an ancillary cog in the machine. The word left a bad taste in his mouth.

  There was no one home when he got back to the park. Jessica was at the garage, and God only knew where Gena had gotten herself to.

  He sat heavily on the couch and stared at the wall for nearly three hours.

  He had to force himself to get up and move to his computer desk. He tried to write, fingers tripping slothfully from key to key. After a few false starts, he sat back from the screen. His brain seemed to be too big for his skull, bursting painfully with ideas and images, none of which he'd managed to translate into words.

  He had felt it once, that white heat of creation. It had once meant so much to him, more than oxygen once. Everything had grown out of that impulse.

  He thought about his senior year at Cornell, the student magazine he'd edited that year. There was a little release party at one of those hole-in-the-wall bookstores that littered downtown Ithaca. Page-Turner's, it was called. It had been years since he'd last gone there. The place probably didn't even exist anymore. He never did find out if the name was a pun of some kind. It must have been, all those places have blandly clever little puns for names.

  They were just a bunch of posturing pseudo-intellectuals back then, all sorts of big ideas with no way to back them up. They were all stewing in self-congratulation, assured of their own genius. Then she came inside, and right away they all knew that there was something different about her: she was someone real.

  Her long pink hair was braided on both sides and buzzed close down the middle but for three long spikes. Her leather jacket was too big for her, her cut-off jeans too small. She had more piercings and tattoos than he'd even seen in his whole life. She wore a silky violet scarf wrapped around her neck – not the most practical in the New York winter – and her make-up was slathered on so thick that she hardly seemed human: purple eyeliner you could see from across the street, black lipstick that made her three silver lip-rings stand out like strands of wire in a pool of ink. Next to her rather unimposing friends, she looked to be about six and a half feet tall.

  He remembered sitting behind his little table, knees knocking while everyone in the store gathered around her. She didn't even seem to notice that she'd become the center of attention, perhaps she was simply so used to it by then that it no longer seemed strange. She wandered through the store, popping her chewing gum and eying the overcrowded shelves dubiously. There was no pretense, none of that polite blandness to which he had become accustomed. When she finally came around to his table, his hands were shaking and his tongue felt thick and dead. She picked up their little paper-bound collection of short-stories and poetry. She cocked one eyebrow, and he knew right away that everything was wrong. Those people who'd been telling him all night how talented he was, how visionary was his work, they were all wrong. He saw at once how pitiful he was, how small and undeserved his ambition.

  She flipped through the little book. And then she looked at him. “You wrote this?” she asked and he just nodded, his throat was too dry even to attempt speech. She turned to the index. God, what had he been thinking? All the titles flashed through his mind. How had they ever seemed so clever and elegant, so beautiful? He realized that they were all silly, all pretentious and awkward. He couldn't bear to face her.

  “Oh, hey,” she said, pointing to one title with a hooked nail. He looked up, eyes shining with a feverish desire, a desperation. “I think I read that one before... you wrote it for an English class, right? I think my friend was in that class, she showed me.”

  He nodded weakly. One of his stories. “What did you think?” he asked, deflating, prepared to be disappointed. She would tell him how incredible his writing was, would offer some of blasé praise, meaningless and self-effacing. She would say it, and the spell would dissipate. He was almost relieved. She seemed too real to exist. It was easier to be disappointed by the expected.

  But that wasn't how it happened. She shrugged. “I didn't really like it, to be honest. I don't know, short stories aren't really my thing.”

  And that is when he fell in love with Jessica Riley.

  He reached out his hand towards her, wrist limp and palm sweaty. “Nathan Harrison,” he said, his voice an awed murmur. There was engine oil on her knuckles.

  She grinned. Her grip was firm. “Jessica,” she said.

  “Do... do you want to... go somewhere?” It was like they were the only two people in the room. He realized, for the first time in his life, that he didn't care how he looked, didn't care what they thought of him. She was the only one who mattered. If she said yes that what did they matter?

  “You got a place in mind?” she asked, cocking her head.

  He couldn't remember where they went that night. Everything after they left the book shop was a blur to him now. He remembered, only vaguely, walking down a gleaming sidewalk with her, having to run almost just to keep up with her long stride. He remembered crossing a footbridge over one of the mossy gorges. He remembered music, remembered dancing, his body touching hers like two leaves tumbling together towards the earth.

  Where had that gone? How had he wound up here? He couldn't stop thinking about what it would be like, putting on the suit, packing up his briefcase. Going to work, to teach. For how long? Perhaps the next best part of his life. Creation had failed, and he was just another failure, an empty shape.

  He rubbed his eyes, fighting back a yawn. All his adult life he had dreamed that he might someday make it. His definition of "making it" had been drastically altered over the past twenty-five years or so, scaled back with every failure. Right now, he thought, he could be content with very little.

  But he was tired.

  He deleted everything that he had written over the past month, dragging the files one by one onto the trash icon. He shut off the computer. The screen went black and, for an instant, he saw his own face reflected back at him.

  The lightbulb in the next room was dying again. The new light fluttered, threatening to burn out, flaring as angrily and insistently as a squalling infant. He shut down the computer, and he went towards the dying light.

  Piano Wire

  The piano teacher's face is a map of his particular past. Webbed with the lines and scars of life, it sags as morbidly on his skull as an ill-fitting Halloween mask. She knows what hides behind it. There are secrets and desires behind the faces of all men that are alien to her, to all women. When a man see a woman, there is something in him that comes alive, shimmers with the desire to pull her open. Sometimes it shows on their faces, in the hungry wet smiles and the soft bovine eyes and in the set of the jaw. Most of the time it is silent, stirring in their loins, coiling hot up in their guts. She can feel it when their eyes touch her, she can feel the tearing, the ripping, the raking of their fingernails on her skin.
She knows that they want nothing more than to peel away the skin and watch her bleed on the floor, more naked than naked, utterly bare and utterly subject. Nothing so beautiful as a dead woman's body, pale sallow thing devoid of thought. A thing to be used. They all want it in some part of them, it is their disease. You can't blame someone for their sickness. She endures their eyes because she knows that they are helpless, just little boys screaming for the distant memory of mother's torn body.

  She knows what thoughts hide behind that fleshy mask, and she keeps a wary eye on the Piano Teacher whenever he sits on the long stool beside her little Sally. She watches the mask when he picks up her chubby pink hands in his leathery gray hands and puts her chubby pink fingers to the soft plastic keys beneath his leathery gray fingers. She watches the mask when he smiles at Sally, tells her in his softly lilting European voice that she's doing so very well, and pats her on her blonde head. And she watches the mask when he is making Sally's fingers dance gaily across the black and white keys. She sees the flickering of masculine revulsion rising in his ancient features, and she is afraid for her little girl.

  Kim's father often wore the same look, and she learned long ago how to protect herself. She leans forward and lets her breasts hang heavy and pendulous and she purrs at the Piano Teacher in a voice like dripping honey and she says words which are soft and weak and admiring:

  “You played that beautifully.”

  “You're magnificent, she's doing so well.”

  “I could never do that, you're amazing!”

  And his eyes find her mother's milk in the warm dark of her shadowy cleavage and he lights up his savage desire to tear her apart and push his thing into all the squirmy bits of her ripped self. She feeds her pieces into the fire of his maleness, stoking the flames so hot that they sear away those angry thoughts of little Sally which are pushing their ugly fingers into his mind.

  She shoves out her tits and her ass and she wears her shortest skirts and she wears her heaviest make-up and she lets her every fraction of self shout out to this man in its desperate fragile woman's voice that she is his if only he will take her: Yes yes, take me! Fuck me! Desire me! Put your hands inside me and rip me open, but only just don't look at my little darling Sally.

  The black keys, they depress.

  She prefers to look at the white keys anyway, like a vast row of emotionless teeth, unbroken and flat. Not like a child's mouth, a mouth full of gaps and weaknesses and penetrations and smiles. Children's mouths are full of lies. Full of filth.

  Mother must scrub all that away, must strip the filth off like peeling back skin. Mother must protect daughter, draw all those eyes that burn and prick and let them prick her and let them burn her because she has tougher skin. Mother will keep you safe, little darling Sally child, if you will only just trust me.

  * * *

  “Sally is coming along very well,” Mr. Hephenkemp said, his thick accent musically indistinct.

  “That's wonderful news.” Kim smiled. “It does sound so lovely.”

  The teacher smiled back. He rubbed the tips of his long fingers together as though gathering a sort of electricity there. “She really must practice, though. This is essential. All of music, it is practice.”

  “I know,” Kim sighed. “We're just looking for the right instrument, you understand?”

  Not two weeks ago she'd found her daughter drawing on napkins that Kim had brought home from the restaurant. Sally drew keys on the paper and spread it out in front of her and she played it, poking at the empty spaces with her fingers. “I can hear it, Mommy!” she said, her eyes screwed shut and her broken smile filling her mouth, “I can hear music!” It just about broke Kim's heart to see. Some children were too perfect for such a world.

  Mr. Hephenkemp leaned close and said in a lower voice so that the mother of the little boy whose lesson was after Sally's wouldn't hear, “If the problem is money, you might look at a thrift shop? Maybe you'll find an old keyboard. Something to let her get a feel for the fingerings.”

  Kim's back went stiff, but she made herself smile and she said a whispered thank-you. As though he'd given her access to some great secret, as though she hadn't tried the thrift store a thousand times already!

  Practice or no practice, Sally was going to learn the piano. Kim had decided. She'd taken piano lessons once herself, for a very short while. She had so wanted to learn, but her father refused to allow her to continue, had burned the books in the fireplace so that not a single note remained. But Sally would learn. What were children for, if not to correct the mistakes of the past?

  Kim couldn't afford to pay for Sally's lessons, not really, but she had made do. She had gone weeks without anything from her black case. Of course she had some methadone from the clinic still, but that could only dull the edge, couldn't take it away. She'd considered going back to Robert, but the thought of that horrible picture Kevin Peterson had taken was enough to dissuade her. She wasn't going back to that, back to taking money for it. If you let a man pay for it, he could take off the mask, and you'd know what he was really like underneath it all. She couldn't stand to look again.

  The lesson was over. Sally gathered up her books – how expensive they'd been, Kim could scarcely believe it! – and she let Kim guild her from the Piano Teacher's house. They had to walk past the boy whose lesson was after Sally, as they did every week. Every week his mother was there with him, and every week Kim thought she heard a voice from inside that other woman's head. Slut! Whore! Shame! Shame! And every week Kim resented it. That woman didn't know what it was like to have a darling little daughter. Boys were different. Boys were safe.

  But boys will turn on you, whispered Kim's little voice, boys will grow up and they'll look at you with a man's eyes one day, just wait. I do what I have to do.

  It had already happened with Jeffrey. Her little niggerchild, she had called him, only ever in her head. Only in that little voice that couldn't hurt feelings or offend the gentle ears of children. She had loved him. She loved to run her fingers through his curly dark hair that was so unlike her own, and she had loved to press her palm against his skinny baby chest and look at the way her skin seemed so pink and blood-filled while he laughed and kicked his chubby brown legs. Oh how she still missed Jeffrey's father! That man who had left her with nothing but the trailer and the memories and the little baby who so resembled him.

  But babies grew up, especially boy babies. And now Jeffrey had come home looking just like his father. And he wouldn't talk to her anymore. And when he looked at her there was anger and hurt in his face, and there was also a desire there that frightened her. He looked too much like his father, that man who had wanted to swallow her whole.

  Kim stood on the sidewalk outside the Piano Teacher's house. The sun was hot above Verden. The street was unpopulated outside those blank-faced houses which lined the road on either side. Verden rustled its trees and shrugged its broad cement shoulders and settled into the lonely earth. Kim reached down and wrapped her fingers through Sally's. “Danny's going to pick us up today. Won't that be fun?” She looked down at her daughter, trying to read her face, always trying to read her. Oh, but how could you know what a person thought? Her boys were still a mystery to her, not only Jeffrey but Walker and Garrett too. “Don't you want to see Dan?” she asked again, prodding her child.

  Sally smiled. “Uh-huh!" she sing-songed, swinging Kim's hand around.

  Kim was relieved. Sally still liked Dan. That was good. Men sensed it when children didn't like them, and men were jealous creatures. Kim's father had been jealous, and just look what had come of that.

  They stood together on the side of the road, mother and daughter, and they waited for Dan's shiny car to turn down the far road. Sally hummed the pieces she'd been playing inside. They were simple little songs, Kim even recognized some of them. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that her own mother had used to sing to her, cradling hands warm and soft and dusted with flour.

  Kim didn't like to think about her mother.
Her mother had been like that woman inside the Piano Teacher's house. Her mother hadn't known what Kim knew, she hadn't known how much you needed to protect daughters. Of course, Kim had made her share of mistakes. She tried not to think about her oldest, about Alice. She found she couldn't help it though, and when Dan pulled up onto the side of the road in his shiny car and rolled down the window to take in the sight of her, she was crying. She put on her sunglasses before he could see, and she put her daughter in the car.

  “You have a good lesson?” Dan asked, turning around to check Sally's buckle.

  “Yup,” Sally nodded.

  “What did you learn?” he asked.

  Sally shrugged. “I guess nothin'.”

  Dan's eyebrows shot up. “Nothing? Jeez Louise!”

  Sally giggled helplessly at that. Words were funnier when you hadn't heard so many of them.

  And then Dan was looking back at Kim. Good, make her laugh and then look away! Look back at Mother's tits, don't pay any attention to my beautiful little daughter, my unspoiled treasure. Kim buckled her seatbelt, pulling the strap tight between her breasts in a way that had long since become automatic for her. And just as automatic was the burning of his eyes on her. Dan wore the mask better than most. She had never felt so safe with a man before. He took that twelve step shit so seriously. Dan was a man in control of his self, as much as a man could be.

  His dark hair was cut real short and he had lots of tattoos that he liked to show off by wearing as little clothing as possible – shorts and a t-shirt in November, that kind of thing. He asked her if she wanted to go anywhere.

  Kim looked at him. Those little piano songs were dancing in her head. The black keys, she thought, they depress. Ba Ba Black Sheep. She needed to talk to Jeffrey before he vanished. Before he was gone like Alice was gone. Or worse, like Mike was gone.

  She shook her head. “I think we should get home.”

  Dan shrugged. “You're the boss.” The shiny car turned back to the road, and the Piano Teacher's house in the mirror fell away behind them.