American Dead

by PW Cooper

  She separated her knees, her thighs. Her short fingernails clicked against the little metal button on her shorts.

  Michael lowered himself onto her very slowly. He put his hands gently on her hips, lowered his mouth to her breast. The weight of his body rested between her legs. She had to lift herself up to kiss him. His lips were numb and trembling and closed and when he opened his mouth to her it was cold.

  In that moment, staring into the quieted face of a boy she hardly knew, Jessica had felt the world falling suddenly out from underneath her. It had come to her then, the words written across her mind as though in fire: I want my life to change. I don't want this.

  She had seen the hurt and loss and confusion buried deep in Michael Conner's eyes, and she had seen herself reflected there. And there was Nathan in the corner, his gaze holding them both prisoner. In that moment the three of them had been closer than any three people had ever been. They were a single whole, warring and hating and loving and despairing.

  She was still thinking of that moment, even now months later, when the door opened and Nathan walked into the room. He looked at her, misery in his pitiful face, and he stared at her. “I'm sorry, Jessie,” he said.

  She was up before she knew what had happened, and she struck him across the face so hard that he stumbled. She pushed him to his knees, trembling with a fury which she could not bear to feel. She stared down at her husband, disgust and loathing building in her, directed as much towards herself as to him.

  Nathan looked up at her, a bewildered expression on his face. A thin trail of blood slipped down his cheek. He laughed once, a confused snort, and he started to cry. Tears ran from his injured eye as as the flesh began to swell and turn to black.

  Jessica straightened her clothes. Neither of them said anything. The words didn't seem to exist which might put the moment back into some kind of recognizable shape.

  She looked down at her husband, and she felt something change between them. Her thumb went instinctively to the smooth familiarity of the plain gold band on her ring finger.

  Cool green light filled the room.

  Procedural Breakdown

  05:31 am, July 1st, 2002

  Jeffrey Burke woke up.

  * * *

  05:43 am, July 1st, 2002

  Jeffrey sat upright. Andrew Follis' couch was as stiff and hard beneath him as it had been every other night. He shoved his crumpled blankets aside and held his head in his hands. Static buzzed in his skull, throbbing with every heartbeat. The beer-taste in the back of his throat clawed back up the root of his tongue. He swallowed hard.

  He hadn't slept very well, nor for very long. A few hours at best, less than fitfully. Everything was bleary through the haze of evaporating sleep. He rubbed his eyes. It was dark in the window; the sun was just beginning to crest the hills outside, spilling white light across the horizon.

  * * *

  05:58 am, July 1st, 2002

  He'd been wandering last night.

  He had walked aimlessly through Ithaca. He wandered across the commons around six o'clock. The streets had been glowing with that particular ambiance, a russet light filtered through fog. This was a rural sort of city, trees twisted their wet black roots into cracked sidewalks and thick green vines creeping silently over aging brick walls. There was an old look to the buildings, as though they too had grown out of the earth.

  It took four stores to find a place that didn't ask for ID, but he bought a case of beer and brought it with him back to the commons. He slumped down at a park bench across from the Dewitt Mall, where the ivy-clad walls were low and dark and the entrance framed under an elegant maroon canvas.

  He drank without thought, watching the people walking by and thinking nothing of them. By the time he had finished the case the streets were dark. He went back to Andrew's apartment and he slept.

  * * *

  06:03 am, July 1st, 2002

  Jeffrey stared into the glowing innards of the toaster, at the thin red filaments burning angrily.

  This was not his real life, he was sure of that. He felt old, as though he'd lived too long. His life had somehow started without him, without warning. He realized as he watched his toast burning that he had stumbled into adulthood still a child, totally unprepared. The bills, the loans, all the expenses – it was more than he could bear to think about. He had to be at work in an hour. It was his second week on the job. They were tearing down a building, scraping clear the ruins of a burned-out wreck. Two hundred miles away, people just like him were probably doing the same at Ground Zero.

  He didn't want to think about that.

  * * *

  06:12 am, July 1st, 2002

  Jeffrey chewed without thinking. He stared at the newspaper without reading it. He swallowed, but he did not taste.

  He'd lost his virginity three years ago to a girl named Caroline. He'd been thinking about her a lot recently. He hadn't really known her, not on any genuine level.

  A few select moments of that night were crystallized in his mind, the rest of it faded. He remembered the clean scent of the sheets, the feel of her body against his own, the way Caroline's brow had furrowed and her mouth opened in a sad sort of gasp when he first entered her. The sour taste of her mouth, the color of her bedroom wall and the noises she'd made when he had touched her. He remembered nothing beyond that. Only those fleeting images, like the memories were paper dissolved in a hard rain and there were only a few scraps and half-phrases floating sodden on the surface.

  He wondered if she remembered him at all. If she ever thought of him.

  Jeffrey finished his toast and went to take a shower, still thinking of Caroline. He hadn't felt any sexual urges for some time now. It was as though that part of him had simply died. The truth was, he'd never been comfortable with it. He knew some men who talked about their genitals like they were a separate creatures, unique souls operating of their own volition: the animal self, free of guilt or conscience, always hungry and never satisfied, the unfulfillable void. He felt that way sometimes. He stood in the shower and looked down at himself. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had an erection. Nothing excited him anymore.

  * * *

  06:26 am, July 1st, 2002

  Andrew was there when Jeffrey came out of the bathroom. He sat at the table, sleepily stirring the soggy brown mush of his instant coffee. The dark liquid sloshed in the off-white mug as it dissolved.

  “You got work?” Andrew asked, fighting back a yawn. Andrew worked night shifts mostly. The two of them hardly saw each other, despite having shared the same space for weeks now.

  Jeffrey nodded. “At seven-thirty, yeah.”

  “Hm.” Andy nodded. He looked at the couch, his expression clouded. He looked up, seeming to have come to a decision. “You know... I told you that you could stay here for a couple weeks if you wanted, Jeff.”

  “Yeah?” A puddle was forming beneath Jeffrey's feet.

  “It's been like... two months.” Andy shrugged and turned back to his coffee, leaving the words hanging there in the air.

  “You want me to go?”

  “I didn't say that.” Andy sipped at his beverage.

  Jeffrey got his clean clothes out of the bags which he still hadn't properly unpacked and he took them with him back into the bathroom to get dressed for work.

  * * *

  07:52 am, July 1st, 2002

  His shovel bit into the black ash. Sweat ran down Jeffrey's back. The bright orange vest made his skin itch. He lifted the shovelful of charred detritus and tossed it into the back of the hulking truck. A car flew past on the lonely highway, traveling into the distance along the highway. There was nothing beyond the rubble, only the sweeping empty hills of Upstate New York, sparsely wooded and gray.

  The shovel bit into the ash. And again and again.

  It was hard work with the road crew, left his limbs aching from the strain for hours after. They had been clearing away the rubble for the last three days, trucking away the blistered remains
to some unknown wasteland. The house had burned down in April. The man and woman who'd once lived there had been trapped in the upper floor, unable to do anything but scream out the window. They might have lived if they'd only had the courage to jump. By the time the fire was reported the wreck was already cooling, and it fell to the State to clear away the wreckage.

  It wasn't the sort of job which Jeffrey had imagined for himself, but it was all he'd been able to find. There didn't seem to be any real jobs within reach, nothing that he wanted. This was what had been left for him.

  He stopped shoveling for a moment, putting his hands to the ache at the base of his spine. He looked out across the waste, at the other men toiling in the sun like worker insects below the blazing eye of God.

  A man was raked the debris out to the edge of the desolate foundation, smoothing it flush with the blackened concrete. He was worn as old leather, beaten dark by the sun. Under his mesh vest was his stained white t-shirt; it showed a cartoon drawing of a full-chested woman with fat red lips and long straw-blond hair, dressed a tiny red bikini and bent down over a beer-gutted trucker with a bottle in his hand. She massaged his feet with her thin fingers, standing atop the words: Man's real best friend.

  The shirt made Jeffrey feel queasy. Every time he saw it pulled tight over the man's wide belly, he felt a momentary surge of disgust. He turned back to rubble, and tried not to look at it.

  Later that day the man introduced himself. Ted Hemingway, he said his name was, and Jeffrey said, “Oh, like the writer, then.”

  Ted laughed, a horse chuckle like the gasping of a dying giant. “What the hell are you talking about, kid?” He clasped Jeffrey's hand firmly in his own. “Gonna be a hot one today,” he said, and spat a thick dark wad of off-color saliva from his mouth.

  Jeffrey shrugged.

  * * *

  12:14 pm, July 1st, 2002

  The road crew had stopped for lunch. Jeffrey sat across the far ditch from the others and watched his laconic coworkers pick at their lunches of processed foods and sour warm fluids. He felt a growing sense of dread. The idea which had occurred to him that morning – that he was trapped in a perpetual adolescence – raked at his insides. He took a bite of his peanut-butter sandwich. It stuck thickly to the roof of his mouth. His mother used to make him this sort of lunch to take to school. Eating it reminded him of her.

  There was a little graveyard behind him, just on the other side of the rotting wood fence against which he was resting. He turned his head. The safety helmet clacked against the soft wood. The gravestones clustered in the shadow of the hillside were like a creeping gray cloud low on the earth, the human dead eating the world out from beneath its surface.

  One of the workmen across the highway tossed aside an empty chip bag and the silvery plastic fled out into the emptiness of the grass, skittering desperately as a rodent and flashing in the sun.

  He didn't want to be buried, Jeffrey thought. He didn't want to end up decaying in the ground, purifying beneath the weight of his gravestone. He wondered if there was some way to kill himself that wouldn't leave anything behind. Maybe burning, turn the bones right to powdered ash, disappear from the world on the anonymous wind.

  He chewed his sandwich. It would be time to get back to work soon.

  * * *

  05:42 pm, July 1st, 2002

  Jeffrey found his things on the steps outside Andrew's apartment building. He picked up his duffel bags, looking up at the stone-red face of the brick building. He considered for a moment going up to talk with Andy, imagined all the viscous things he might say. It was an empty fantasy, however; he knew that.

  He didn't really blame Andy for finally kicking him out. They'd never liked each other much, anyway, not since High School. Friendship in entropy. He was glad that it was over, even if it had left him without a place to live.

  The bus stop was just down the street, and all the possibility it promised stood before him. He could go anywhere in the world, could do anything he wanted. He could go anywhere he wanted to go.

  * * *

  06:34 pm, July 1st, 2002

  Jeffrey put his bags down on the side of the road. The sign had lost another letter: High G rge Pa k. The curtains were drawn across the windows at the house on the hill. The screen in the distance rotted.

  He was home.

  * * *

  06:37 pm, July 1st, 2002

  Sally and Garrett were playing in the dirt outside the trailer, bent intently over a handful of old green-plastic army figures which had once belonged to Jeffrey. Their skin was scabby and dirty, their bodies as scrawny as those captured in the depression era photos he'd once found in an American history book at the school library. Sally sat with her skirt stretched between her legs like a trampoline, an old doll laying atop the tight-drawn cloth.

  Jeffrey dropped his bags beside the door. His two siblings looked up at him, squinting against the sunset. The two children glanced at each other, looking to each other for guidance.

  “What are you doing out here?” Jeffrey asked.

  “Playing,” Sally said.

  “Why don't you play inside? It's dirty out here.” Jeffrey scraped his heel on the bare dirt. The ground was rough around the trailer. It hadn't changed.

  “Mommy wants us to be outside,” Garrett muttered, his eyes sliding away.

  “Yeah?”

  “She said we needed to get out in the sun.” Sally grinned her gap-toothed little smile up at him.

  Jeffrey smiled back despite himself. “Did she?”

  Sally brightened, clutching her doll against her chest. “She said that Alice is coming soon. She's coming tomorrow!”

  “I heard that.”

  The Park was quieter than he remembered. He thought of all his old friends who had now moved away, drifted off to their new lives. He could heard their ghosts running through the trailer park, whopping and hollering in the high heat of the summer. He remembered being banished by his mother to scrabble in the dirt, and she drawing one of her boyfriends into the warm darkness of her bed.

  “I'm gonna go inside.” he said.

  Sally blanched. “No, you can't. Mama said we can't come in.”

  He ignored her. The door was locked, but he still had a key.

  Sally and Garrett exchanged a look as he fumbled with the lock. “But... she's resting...” Garrett whispered. His little sister looked up at him, her eyes round a green and open. He shook his head and stepped up into the trailer.

  The smell hit him at once, immediately familiar. Decay, neglect, the scent of dust so thick that it turned the air silver. He walked past an overturned garbage bag and went inside the room which he and Alice had once shared.

  There was nothing familiar there. It was a young person's room now, strewn with leftover school papers red-inked with dismissive criticism. There was a ragged baseball glove in the closet beside a pair of second-hand ice skates and a tennis racket which couldn't have been less than thirty-five years old. A tangle of twist-limbed action figures lay on the floor, their accessories scattered. Ragged clothes were draped on the backs of chairs and piled in corners and stuffed madly into an over-full dresser whose drawers were all open and gagging on wrinkled colors.

  It wasn't Jeffrey's room anymore. It belonged to someone else now. There were two cots beside the bed. He wondered if all three of his little siblings shared the room. He remembered staying up long nights with Alice, talking in the darkness. The little ones had used share the room across the hall; they slept with Mom when she let them.

  He went on, deeper into the trailer. His mother's door was closed. He heard a wordless murmuring from inside her room and leaned close. “Mom? I need to talk to you, Mom,” he said.

  Her bedsprings sighed. She coughed hard, a deep cough from the back of her throat. The mattress groaned as though she were trying to rise and failing.

  Jeffrey retreated to the couch across from the kitchenette. Even now, as far removed as he was and as grown up as he tried to be, it still frightened
him. It had always been terrifying when Mom got high. Like there was a second person inside her, a person who not only neglected to love him, but seemed to actively despise him. He'd learned to recognize the signs. He thought about Garrett and Sally, playing in the dirt outside, afraid to enter. How much did they know? He wanted to scream.

  The blank television set seemed to be sizing him up with its single dead eye. The remote was nestled in the couch cushions, greasy with fingerprints. He turned on the television. The set was black and white, tuned to junk and crusted with static. He shut it back off.

  * * *

  06:48 pm, July 1st, 2002

  His mother stumbled. Her hair was tied back and her eyes red. She came down the hall with both hands against the walls for support. She came towards him, practically crawling. He wasn't sure if he was afraid of her or angry at her. Both, maybe. She had on a mossy cotton bathrobe, cord tied limply about her waist; it hung off her body like rotting skin. She smiled and tried to embrace him, track-marked arms reaching blindly.

  His breath stopped when she closed around him. Her damp and greasy hair lashed his face, sticking against it like strands of oily taffy.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, the muscles in her face twitching. “I tried to call, but I didn't know where to find you...” Her green eyes glowed, a manic ferocity buried deep in them, deep down. Her pale face was tight, the lines in the corners of her eyes like cracked glass.

  He tried to remember how old she was, had to do a bit of math. Thirty-four? She looked too old for her age. Her hand stroked his cheek. She wasn't all that much older than he was, really. He felt sick.

  “Are you awake?” he asked. He'd meant to sound cold, but his voice came out quivering.

  Kimberly bit her lower lip, blinking slowly. “What?”

  “This is why your kids are out playing in the dirt? So you can... do this?” He bit off each word, voice shaking and teeth set hard.

  She sighed, slumping into the moth-eaten couch. “Go on, tell me again what a terrible mother I am. Don't you get tired of this, Jeffrey?”

  “Tired? No, Mom, what I'm tired of is seeing the way you treat those kids! It isn't right!”

  Kimberly rubbed her arms. “We've had this argument before, Jeffrey. Anyway... you and Alice turned out just fine... You weren't so scarred, now were you? Just leave the guilt trip for another time, okay? I'm... tired...”