American Dead

by PW Cooper

  I thought as he passed by our trailer that, even through the shadows about his face and the curtain of thundering rain, I recognized his face. It was absurd, I know, but I thought for a moment that it was Alice Burke's husband. Of course that was impossible, she'd moved away right after graduation and none of us had seen her since. There was no reason for him to be here in Verden, much less talking to Mike. Anyway, I'd only ever seen him once or twice before, and then only at a distance. Of course if wasn't him!

  Even so, there was something familiar about the man. I wanted to ask Michael about it, tried a dozen times over the course of the summer to work up the courage to ask, but I never did manage to get around to it. Some things, I decided, were better left unknown.

  * * *

  By the end of the first day my neck was sore from staring up at the monuments.

  We slumped our way to the final stop of the tour too tired to pay any attention to where we were. I remember seeing framed papers on the walls and portentous bronze-cast busts ringing the room like guardsmen. The building was all white stone, like all the rest of them had been. At the foot of the long wide stair was a winding footpath which lead from monument to monument. Tall marble columns surrounded the stone courtyard outside the building.

  Michael Conner and I sat together between two columns, watching the sun set over the capital lawn. It was nearly dark, and starry pin-heads of light were beginning to peer down through the gray sky.

  “Everything is so old in this city,” I said, looking up at the cracked stone roof. Everything was the color of dried bones. There were dead men's faces everywhere. The postcard monuments looked in person more like gravestones.

  “I love this place.” Michael said, his voice more subdued than I'd ever heard it.

  I looked at him, surprised. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I don't know. Just feels like home somehow.”

  * * *

  It was a long walk up the hill to the Conner's house. It was the first day of September, and everything was changing. It was the beginning of my last year of high school. I could already feel it all slipping away, Mike included. He looked tired all the time now, his eyes red-rimmed and his skin waxy pale. His fingers twitched with nervous energy, and he had a hungry look to him.

  I knocked on the door, and Mrs Conner answered. She looked me up and down. All my life I had known her, and yet she looked at me as though I were a stranger, looked me up and down as though taking a measure of my character. “I suppose you're here for my son,” she said, her tone strained.

  I just nodded, and was let in without further interrogation. She followed me with her eyes as I went out onto the patio where Michael was waiting for me. He was looking very thin, slumped in a deck chair wrapped in an old blanket. The sun beat down, and he shivered. He made no reaction to my arrival. He looked sick.

  “Hey,” I called out.

  One eye rolled open. “Trevor.”

  “It's me.”

  “Sit down.”

  I did as I was told, sitting in the chair beside the grill. There were dead leaves from last fall still caught in the canvas folds of the grill cover; it stank of old rain. Michael watched me, so devoid of any expression that I couldn't tell if he was actually aware of me or not. We sat like that for a long time.

  I peeled back the edge of the clinging grill cover, like stripping away skin from bone. A heavy black fly buzzing fatly up at me from beneath the cover. There was an old plate which had been left on the grill arm, slick with congealed grease and raw meat. Little insects swarmed on the slick gunk, scuttling beneath the raised edges of the plate. The fly crawled on the dirty ceramic surface, stopping every few inches to rub its gleeful legs. I thought of a story I'd read in the newspaper about a woman who had accidentally taken abortive drugs further into her pregnancy than intended. Out slithered the dead fetus, far larger than she'd expected. She put it in a shoebox and set it on the grill. I'd been unable to finish the story, and so never found out why she put it there or what had ever become of her.

  Michael looked at me, and I thought that he could somehow hear what I was thinking. I knew then that something terrible was going to happen.

  He rose without a word and he took me to his room. I followed him up the stairs, trembling with anticipation. I was afraid and excited. I wanted to hold him in my arms, feel his warmth against mine.

  He sat on the bed. I just watched from the doorway, unsure of what to do with myself. “

  “This is where you sleep?" I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Neat.”

  He stared at me. I stared back, wondering what happened next. “This is a dream,” he said.

  “I'm sorry?”

  “Don't be sorry, Trevor. It's just a fact, is all. It's how the mind works, the firing of synapses, the connections between neurons and all that. Just the release of chemicals. We're more machine than spirit.”

  “Are we?”

  “We are. I read an article about the moments before you die. Your brain releases a rush of chemicals, all those pathways collapsing in on themselves... It's a rush, like a high. You know the expression, 'life flashing before your eyes?' It's like that. It's like a dream, those last moments.”

  “What does that have to do with right now?”

  “We're always dying, Trevor, every moment of every day. Just think about it. Cells dying, memories eroding, the body breaking down, it's happening all the time. It's happening right now. I think I'm looking at you, but all there is to see is reflected light, just an illusion. I think I know you, but it's just chemical reactions.”

  “That doesn't mean anything, Michael. It doesn't make it less real.”

  “Of course it does! Don't you get it?”

  “Not really.”

  He sighed, holding his head in his hands. “I think I'm losing my fucking mind, Trevor.” He looked at me, and his eyes were wet with fear. “I'm in trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Every kind.”

  “Can I help?”

  He shook his head. “Forget it.”

  “I wanna help, Michael.”

  He smiled. “Some things can't be helped.”

  * * *

  We went back to the hotel. Everything there was made to look like it was brand new, though the use showed through regardless: starched sheets spread tight over stained mattresses, packets of wrapped soaps in showers that were discolored around the drains, a dusty television hidden in a faux-wood cabinet, the symbols on the remote control buttons worn away.

  Mike was in the shower, and I was dying with love. I sat trembling on my bed, listening to the falling water and to his feet slapping on the floor. I sat there, trembling and listening, and in my mind there were a thousand scenarios bubbling and spilling out and hissing and boiling.

  The shower curtain was pulled back with a muted rasp of steel rings. Water dripped onto the bare floor. I heard the little closet door open with a wooden groan, heard him taking out a freshly laundered white towel to wrap around himself.

  He came out and he said: “Do you ever have trouble telling the difference between what you remember and what actually happened?”

  “What are you talking about?” I couldn't understand why he was talking. What was there to talk about?

  Mike frowned. “I don't know, exactly. It's just... like... hard to tell what's you and what's just stories you made up about yourself.”

  “Uh... I guess that people want... to remember things a certain way.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Mike sat on the edge of his bed, shaking out his damp hair. He looked at me, and there was a kind of expectation on his innocently beautiful face.

  He was looking at me like he wanted me to do something, and I had been waiting so long to do it. My teeth had been aching all summer long, jaw clenched tight for months to halt the chattering.

  I was not me when I got up off the bed and started walking towards him. Trevor had ceased to exist. Whatever I was before, I w
as moving so fast that it was more inertia than intention which drove my mouth down hard against his mouth. After so many weeks of watching and thinking and wishing and fantasizing and devouring Mike until there was nothing of myself left, kissing him felt suicidally liberating. Like falling from the bridge towards black water, clear and cold and clean. And for the moment when my lips opened I feels another person's teeth I thought that Mike was kissing me back. And I fell though the ice.

  Mike pushed me away. His towel was gripped in my hand somehow and it pulled away from him and he tripped and fell naked to the floor and stared up at me with the strangest expression of surprise and hurt and confusion that I have ever seen on another person's face.

  He didn't say anything. He crawled away from me. I had made him pathetic. Was it me? Or had he always been like that? Even after he broke me and made me want him more than I wanted to live. Now I'd made him crawl and that was my revenge for what he did to me and wasn't he supposed to love me back?

  And then I was myself again. “I... thought... thought you...” I spoke in halting fragments. I was ashamed. So ashamed my insides felt hollowed out, a gaping gravitational void inside my chest swallowing everything.

  He didn't say anything. He didn't look at anything except the floor as he gathered his dirty clothes off the chair where he'd left them and he hurried naked out the door naked into the hallway with his jeans and shirt held against him.

  He shut the door behind him.

  * * *

  Two days later, we all got back on the bus and went home. Mike and I don't sit together, didn't look at each other. Everything had changed.

  We went back to High Gorge Park, back to school, back to our friends. It was our last year of high school. The rumor started going around school that I was gay, and people started to bully me even more than they had before. It was nothing to me, I barely heard the things they shouted after me, barely felt it when they shoved me against the lockers, barely noticed the disgusted looks. None of it mattered anymore. We moved out of the trailer park that November, moved into a house. A real house. It has always felt empty to me.

  Time passed both too quickly and too slowly. Mike dropped out a few weeks before Christmas Vacation and never came back. Since I wasn't living in the park anymore, I never saw him again. I heard some rumors, but nothing that made sense. Jeffrey and Molly both got accepted to colleges, Jeffrey in California, Molly to a local community college, an hour outside Verden. I had planned to get as far away as possible, but I couldn't work up the energy for it and ended up going to the same school Molly had picked. Scott joined the army. He left just after graduation for a training camp in Mississippi, never having said a single word to me since it came out that I was gay.

  Molly and I weren't in any of the same classes, but we kept in touch. It was made easier by the fact that we were both living in the dorms. About a month after classes started, the planes hit the towers. I sat there in the rec-room with a bunch of people I didn't know, staring wide-eyed as the smoke billowed out and the air filled with paper. Everybody was crying as they watched it happening, clinging to each other, strangers in the arms of strangers. I couldn't bear to touch them, or to be touched by them. I felt so horribly alone that I was sure I would die of it. I looked out the window. The morning light was breaking over the horizon, and I thought about Michael Conner. Nine months later, Molly told me that his body had been found in the gorge outside the park.

  That's when it really hit me that I was alone in the world.

  Come On Down

  Gena stared through the haze of smoke. She looked at Trevor. “Did all that really happen?”

  Trevor nodded. His eyes fluttered lazily, his mind dipping in and out of dreams.

  “I never knew that... About you and Mike, I mean.”

  “Yeah...”

  “It wasn't your fault. You didn't know how it was all going to turn out...” she trailed off, unsure what else she could say. She felt like there was something, something she was supposed to say. Nothing came to mind.

  “I never thought that I would tell anybody...” Trevor murmured, clutching at Gena's teddy. She swallowed down the urge to grab the stuffed bear out of his hands and cuddle up to the stupid old thing. She'd meant to throw it away years ago.

  Gena lay down beside him and put her arms around his chest. “You're not alone, Trevor,” she whispered.

  “I know that,” he murmured. His eyes closed again and, for a while, they both slept.

  Matrimony

  All the lights inside the Riley's trailer were off, and it was as quiet there as it had ever been. Jessica sank into the dusty couch and stared at the dead television. The room was reflected back in the black expanse of the blank screen, curved and warped and dim and there she was, cast as the lopsided centerpiece of a dreary piece of domestic surrealism.

  All she could think about was Michael Conner. Mike, gone now.

  Not gone. Dead. Such a hideously final word. The secret had died with him. Nobody knew now but Nathan and she. All that they three had shared together, all that they had been, it was all gone. She found herself thinking of her father. What would he have said, if he'd known? He wouldn't have understand, of course he wouldn't. How could he?

  And Gena... Gena would be destroyed if she ever found out what her parents had gotten up to. Maybe that was why Jessica had gone alone with it. It had been her chance to tell the world that she wasn't going to lie down. But of course nobody knew, and now the secret was dead.

  God, she missed him!

  Take what you want from life, that had always been her philosophy, get what happiness you can before it runs out. But now she wasn't sure anymore how to be happy. She'd lost it when Michael left, and she forgot it when they found his body.

  She felt an emptiness inside herself, a voided space filling with anger and disappointment. She wished she could direct it all at Nathan, but there wasn't much satisfaction in punishing a masochist, so it tended to fall entirely on herself.

  Jessica waited in the silence for what seemed to her like a very long time, thinking about the past.

  Her old friends had all been shocked when she'd married Nathan. “Such a normal guy!” they said, like he was Jimmy Stewart in a turtleneck. She hadn't told her parents about him until after the papers were official.

  Jack and Vivian Riley. She missed them both. Her father was dead and her mother didn't speak to her anymore. All those years in Verden, growing up with grease on her nose and dirt on her knees, Jessica had never once imagined that she would end up living here for so very long.

  She'd been a clumsy child, lanky and awkward and ashamed of her big nose, her acne, her dull brown hair always in tangles around her face, the silver braces on her teeth capping a lopsided smile. She'd studied business administration at NYU. Her first two semesters there she went in long skirts and hair-clips and never once lifted her face, never once spoke in class unless she was called on. Then she spent her Sophomore year abroad. Nine months in London, circa 1981, and mousy little Jessica came back punk rock to the bone. She had found herself there.

  She could only imagine what her parents thought when their little girl came home in ripped leather and studded collars and a blood-red mohawk. She dropped out of school that summer and got Dad to hire her at the garage. He hadn't wanted to, but she was good at it, better than he was though he would never have admitted it. He left her the business when he retired in '83, only a few years before he passed away. She kept the name, kept all the staff, kept pretty much everything on the surface the same as it had always be. Six months later, she met Nathan Harrison at a little bookstore in downtown Ithaca.

  What a marriage it was, nothing like the unshakable and icy alliance which her own parents had shared for so long. Nathan and she had reached the point that they were no longer sure if they were actually in love anymore, and she wasn't sure if she had ever actually liked him.

  He seemed determined to disappear in her, to burrow in her gut like a parasite. Like it would b
e better to see the world from the corner of her eye than head-on from his own. The irony of it was, she'd lost herself somewhere along the way. She had followed Nathan unquestioningly down into the warm interior of his desires, set her own aside to do so. He had been so eager to submerge himself in Jessica. She stopped being herself and let herself become a receptacle for his sexual neurosis. It was funny, in a sick sort of way, how his submission had come to dominate her life, how his yearning to vanish had left her feeling so faded.

  He'd been the one to bring Michael into the marriage. She said no at first, said no a hundred times before she ever said yes. Eventually it did happen, and the first time she made love to Michael it changed everything. She'd remembered that night what it was like to be with somebody real, somebody whole and present. He was young – too young, maybe – but he was more complete than either of them. There was an odd distance to Michael Conner, an emptiness behind his eyes which she found both tragic and enticing.

  She could remember it so clearly. The footsteps scraping in the gravel outside the trailer, that first tentative knock on the door.

  Every time she had sex, Jessica thought of her first time. He had been thin and strong, his skin wound with images of twisted human bones drawn black, like he'd decided to wear his skeleton on the outside. When he put his arms around her, his sun-licked hands had made her own skin look as pale as milk. She'd felt naked next to him, and she was, but he had seemed clothed by his ink-marks. The next day she'd made him take her to the tattoo parlor and she had a coiled vine drawn on her left thigh. It stung for weeks, itching like the desire between her legs.

  She remembered leading Michael towards the bedroom, through the light of dusk spilling from the window, that rosy light which lifted dusty fingers in the air. She drew him after her, and he followed. His body was languid, relaxed like a man facing death who no longer cared for the disposition of his earthly body.

  Jessica lay down on the bed. Nathan watched from the dark corner of the room, his eyes glittering in the green-filtered light which came in through the emerald curtain, eager and jealous.