by J. Warren
“Who says?” she asked, looked at the floor for a few moments, then “how long are you going to stay?”
“I don’t know…a little while. I guess they need me.”
She looked up sharply, “how do you figure that?” Her eyes were hard.
“I don’t know. Mom asked dad to call, and I thought—.”
“You thought you’d swoop in like some hero, and make everything all better just by being here?” she asked, standing up. I stepped back. “Hero, huh? You’re the new superhero-child? Well, you can have them. Dad is a raging homophobe who believes that the 1950’s were some sort of golden age, and mom’s turned into a fucking cunt—,” she got progressively louder as she went on.
“Hey!” I exclaimed under my breath. I looked back down the stairs.
“What, Michael? Are they going to disown us, too? You don’t have a thing to worry about. You’re not the queer one.” She went into the bathroom and started to put her thing in a re-sealable baggie. I wanted to smile at that, but things were too serious. This was another of mom’s inventions. Plastic baggies for shaving cream and shampoo bottles kept the leaks from destroying clothes. Mom was that Stewart lady long before there was a television show.
I moved closer to her “Did dad say something to you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it. If you want to stay here and make yourself the new hero child, that’s fine, Michael. You can count me out, though. You can fucking count me out,” she said. I could tell she was starting to cry.
I expected that she’d start talking the moment we pulled out of the driveway, but she didn’t. The only sound was the hum of the car. I reached for the radio, but I saw her roll her eyes, so I put my hand back down. She stayed quiet as we turned out of the neighborhood. She said nothing as we turned onto the highway. The blinker sounded odd and loud at every turn. I realized I’d never really heard a blinker before; there’d always been some other sound that covered it.
A church van passed us with a load of kids inside. One of them stuck her face against the rear window and waved to us. Sarah made a sound in her throat.
“What?” I asked.
“Kids,” she said, then went quiet again.
I wanted her to keep talking, I realized. I didn’t want to feel alone in the car. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you have to leave?”
“Didn’t you ask me this already?” she returned.
“You didn’t answer, before.”
“You’re right; I didn’t,” she said, and put her elbow up on the window. She rested her head in her hand, and looked out the window. I settled back into driving. She reached into her purse and took out a cigarette. She rummaged through her purse, her face growing more and more stern. I pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dash. She stopped searching, and without looking up said “Diane’s been cheating on me.”
I didn’t know what to say, “Oh.”
The cigarette lighter popped out. She touched it to the end of the cigarette, then put the lighter back with a rough shove. She inhaled once, then exhaled as she rolled the window down. The inside of the car filled with smoke.
“So—so what are you going—umm—,” I started.
“I’m going back to move my things out. Melissa said I can live at her place with her lover and her son.”
“Is—is Melissa—,”
“Queer? Yes, Michael.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good that you have some place to—you know—.”
She inhaled, looked away out the window, exhaled.
“Only in post-modern times could someone fall in love with a murderer,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“It was something Diane said. It’s true, too. She said that only in times like these could someone honestly think they were in love with a murderer.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, “who’s a murderer?”
“No one, Michael. No one. What it means is that—how to say this?—all bets are off, ostensibly. What it means is that you’re doing—all of us are doing, really—what you’re doing maybe isn’t right, but it is very right now.”
“What do you mean ‘what I’m doing’?” I asked.
“What all of us are doing: waiting to see what happens next instead of making things happen. It’s the postmodern condition,” she said and laughed. I couldn’t explain it, but the tone was so dark and poisonous that I shivered.
“Is that what that ‘postmodern’ stuff means?”
“No, not really,” she said, her voice like someone talking to a child. “That means something completely different. I’m just thinking about Diane because she’s a whore. No, what postmodern means is that no one acts like they are ‘supposed to’, and everyone applauds.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked her. The light caught her face and held it. I noticed how she looked, how she really looked. I thought of my sister as more like the me I saw in the mirror every morning than I ever felt. A tingle went down my spine, like cold water.
“Hollywood won’t let us kill off our heroes, Michael,” she told me, sighing. The light caught in her breath: it was cold. “They keep resurrecting them in movie after movie and they won’t let them die, like decent human beings should.” She turned to me, the half her face in soft silver, “What you’re trying to do?—I mean, do you really want to be a hero, Michael?”
I hadn’t thought about it. “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. She nodded as if this somehow confirmed what she’d long suspected. “You?” I asked.
“What?” she asked, “like Sigourney Weaver or something?” She took a moment and thought, looking away. She turned back, “I think that there has to be something in us,” she sighed again, “I don’t know, something that needs a hero. Does that make sense?” she asked. I didn’t know what else to do, so I nodded. “I don’t know that there’s anything that,” she tilted her head up, as if the answer was scrolled on the moon, “archetypical in me. I don’t know that there’s anything in me someone else would want to make themselves like. Did you ever see those movies?”
“Which ones?” I asked.
“With Sigourney Weaver; the science fiction ones.”
“I think I did, a long time ago,” I answered, looking at the ground. I felt like it was some failing of mine that I didn’t know what she meant.
“It’s like that. That character she plays in them has something, something, you understand?” she said. I nodded, even though I didn’t. Her eyes searched my face, then she nodded, too. “They won’t let us kill them off, though. They won’t let us become the heroes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her. I think I understand what she was talking, now, but back then I didn’t.
“Think about it. When you see someone in a movie do some really great stunt,” she said, exhaling smoke upward, her eyes rolled to look at me, “that’s exciting, and it sells tickets, right? But in the long run, what is it they’re saying to you?”
I shrugged.
“They’re telling you that you can never be that. You don’t know thirteen different martial arts,” she said, “you don’t know how to fly a plane after the pilot’s been killed. If some strange creature from another world was about to eat you, you wouldn’t get away.” Silence fell thick around us.
“Oh,” was all I could think to say. She nodded to herself again, and took a drag off her cigarette.
“I think maybe if they made movies about the real people who are heroes every day, no one would go see them. What does that say about what people want to be shown?”
“I don’t know,” I said. At the time, I remember wishing she’d just make whatever point she kept pushing for, and then be quiet or talk about something else. I stared at my shoes.
“Me either, but I’ve got some guesses. Like—take the devil for instance. Why is it the devil is always the hero, or at least the most interesting person in any movie or play where he or she shows up? And that goes al
l the way back to Milton, maybe even before. Everyone is okay with this because we all know that it is easier for us to be charismatic and evil than to attain some higher—I don’t know—good, or whatever,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette.
We pulled off the highway and into the vast airport parking lot. I was amazed at how many cars there were. I didn’t know that this many people lived in town. I pulled the car up to the curb.
“Don’t get out. Pop the trunk. I’ll get my own bags,” she said, and reached for the door handle. Her arm seemed like some separate thing; a bridge put up a long time ago by people who had gone extinct, maybe. I stared at it for a second, thinking that it was resting against her body, not attached to it. I thought that some writer guy might think these kinds of things about that arm, about Sarah.
“Wait,” I said without looking at her. She paused, but I could feel the tension in her hand. She was ready to open the door at any second. “Why did you make me come if you hate them?”
She didn’t move, and we both stared straight ahead, “Because for once, I didn’t want to be the only one having to soak up all their ugly. I know that doesn’t make sense to you, Michael, but maybe it will. There is something horrifying about them, and about everyone in this town. It’s always been there, like some paper cut in my head. There is something drastically wrong with everyone here, Michael. I—I didn’t want to be the only one who had to soak it up for once,” she said, and I felt her arm relax without seeing it.
“Oh,” was all I could think to say.
“Thing is,” she said, and her voice sounded muffled. I wanted to look, but didn’t. “Thing is, you didn’t. It doesn’t even seem to touch you. You’re—it’s like you’re a part of it, or something. I don’t know. Fuck,” she said, and it was more like a whimper than an exclamation. She opened the door, and before I could turn to say goodbye, she was out of the car. The door slammed. I popped the trunk, and though I could see motion in the rearview, I didn’t watch her go.
SIXTEEN
On the way home, I decided something. I couldn’t have told anyone what it was, but something seemed more firm in my head. Because of that, I found myself in the parking lot of the YMCA. Being day after thanksgiving, it was closed. I got out, and walked to the front doors. Cupping my hands around my eyes, I peered in.
Nothing had changed. The front desk was still cluttered, the hallway was still clean enough to count the light bulbs in the reflections. Most of the time, when a building is empty, it seems hollow. There was still—something—here, though.
I jumped halfway out of my skin when someone came around the corner and walked straight to the doors. I kept thinking ‘run’, but I was frozen in place. She was tall and thick through the middle. I couldn’t see much more about her through the darkness, but she came straight at the door. A large ring of keys hung from a cord around her neck. She searched through them for a second, found the right one, then opened the door.
“Can I help you, sir?” Her accent was thick with somewhere else.
“I’m—I used to work here—when I was a kid. I’m back for a visit. I was just—,” I said. Her facial expression never moved.
“Oh. Well, we’re closed. You could come back tomorrow, though. Everyone’ll be back, then.”
“Oh,” I said, and my face must’ve fallen a bit. I hadn’t expected to be able to go inside in the first place, but when she appeared, I had hoped. She looked down, sniffed, then looked back up.
“I was just—I was just about to finish up with the books and things, though. If you—I mean if you’re—when are you leaving town?” she asked.
“Probably tomorrow,” I said. I didn’t know, but it seemed that things were heading that way.
“Oh,” she said, “what did you say your name was?” she asked.
I hadn’t said, “Michael Kendall. I worked here teaching swimming and as a part time custodian a while back. I worked for Mr. Roger.”
“Hell,” she said, her features softening, “Roger Parker?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Ol’ Roger,” she said, smiling to herself, “well, then—as long as you’re not some axe murderer or something,” she grinned a bit, but her eyes held a question, “you could come in for a bit.”
I smiled, “Thanks. I’m no axe murderer. Or, anyway, I’d be a lousy one,” I said as she opened the door a bit wider so I could get in.
“Why’s that?” she asked. I stepped past her, and stopped: everything looked so tiny. I remembered this front room as huge, but the chairs looked squashed together, now.
“No axe,” I said. She closed the door and locked it again.
“I’ll be back here,” she said, moving back down the hallway. I followed after her, still looking at the front room. It had seemed like some huge cave when I was young; it seemed like a tiny waiting room, now. She went down a side hallway to the main offices. I remembered having to run messages for Mr. Roger down that hall. I’d always felt so proud to have business in those offices. The adults saw me and knew my name and they would smile. They’d think I was a responsible kid, a good kid.
When I came back from remembering, I was still standing in the middle of the hall. I could hear her clicking keys. I walked down the hallway, and found myself pushing open the door to the locker room. The smell hit me; even though no one had been in here for the past two days, probably, the place still smelled the same. Old sweat, slow rusting metal, and powerful cleaning products. It was still humid, the air so thick I almost couldn’t breathe. None of this had changed.
Walking further in, I saw that on the next row of lockers, one of the doors was slightly open. I walked over to it and, without thinking, opened the door. Inside was a stack of dirty clothes, and underneath, some of the things that no boy ever forgets: a jockstrap and a cup were piled on top of a set of dark gray sneakers which seemed three seconds from falling apart completely. Someone had been in a hurry and forgotten to twist their lock one time to the right when they closed the door.
In the back of the locker was a small mirror. I looked in it and was shocked to see so old a face while smelling these smells, feeling the thick air against my skin. I closed the locker, and twisted the lock once to the right; the door snugged closed.
I walked to the back of the room, and leaned against the four foot wall dividing the shower area from the locker area. Five tree-trunk thick poles coming up out of a sea of tile; each one divided into six tiny triangle areas by a two foot wide metal panel that ran from six foot high down to four foot high. It was just enough to hide your face from everyone else if you were a kid. I remembered that.
The first time I’d had to take a communal shower had been almost traumatic. Until that moment, I’d never thought about what my body looked like. It was just my body, a little different from everyone else’s, but it hadn’t mattered. I smiled just then, thinking back on it, but it had been hard to deal with. Adult bodies were scary; huge and hairy in weird places; I tried not to look at them. They were loud when they talked to each other, and laughed. They didn’t seem to even notice that everyone was naked; it didn’t shock them at all.
Other boys closer to my age seemed like me, but I didn’t look at them either. That day had been the first time I’d ever seen someone uncircumcised, and it shocked me. Is something wrong with that boy? I’d thought, or is something wrong with me? The question had occupied my mind for a long time after. I guess when I really started through puberty, though, it sort of went away. Other things became more important.
I was still smiling when I came back to now. I could still remember how hot my face felt those first few days, and how my breath would catch. Eventually, it became no big deal, and I’d see other boys embarrassed and shock quiet their first time. I’d smile, and feel something in my chest seeing them. Seeing Susan sometimes, in the morning, when she hadn’t woken up yet, I’d get something very much like that same feeling.
I walked back out of the locker room, and down the hall to the pool. The water was c
ompletely still. I remember that it used to be like this for a few moments on Saturdays, just before they’d open the front doors. I’d come around to the back doors, and use the key that Mr. Roger had given me. I’d walk down the halls those Saturday mornings, and the adults would all say hello to me. I felt important. Then I’d change into my swimsuit and come down that same hall. The water would be just like this; still and smooth, like glass.
Again I noticed how everything had shrunk. The pool used to seem endless. I remember coming up, gasping for air after the first lap I’d ever done completely underwater. It had seemed like forever to get from one wall to the other. Looking down in the now, it was just a standard sized Olympic pool.
The door behind me opened, “Mister—umm—Kendall?”
I turned around, and it was her. “Yeah?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, but I need to get going. Are you—?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m done.”
We walked back down the hall together. “So you worked for Ol’ Roger, huh?” she asked.
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Did I? I’m his niece,” she said. We stopped.
“How is he? Can I visit him?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, her face falling, “I guess you didn’t hear.”
I knew what that meant, “When did it happen?”
“’Bout three years ago. Stroke. He went to bed and just never woke up.”
Something in me fell. “Oh—I’m—I’m sorry,” I said.
“No, it’s okay. He was ‘bout ready to go, anyways. Always said he was just waitin’ around for the black chariot, and it was takin’ it’s own sweet time about getting’ there.” She smiled.
“Black chariot?”
“It was a poem. Aunt Zoe loved it. Emily Dickerson or Dickenson, something like that. ‘Bout a woman who says the chariot waited for her. He liked that poem,” she said, turning and walking again. I followed her out the front door. She locked it behind us. “Sorry you had to find out like this.”