“And yet you left without so much as good-bye.”
“Rose, don’t make this about Steven.”
“I didn’t tell you about Steven.”
“Yeah but ghosts know everything.”
“But you’re not really a ghost, right?”
“Well, I’ve got the psychic thing going for me too, now. It’s complicated. Look, I didn’t ask for any of this.”
I remember now how young Bruce is, ghost or no, psychic or no. And I’m not calling him goddamn Malachi. “Nobody asks for anything,” I tell him. “Every day of your life is getting something you never asked for.”
I wake up and my mouth feels like it’s stuffed with old wool. It’s dark, but I don’t know what time it is.
Late or early.
The phone’s ringing. That’s what woke me.
Bruce?…Steven?…Jack, actually. Worried, I’m sure, or maybe just a bit put out, since we haven’t touched base in a few days.
I wait until the ringing stops. When it does, I shut down the phone. It chirps out its little good-bye song.
The problem is now I’m awake.
I put the TV on and some all-movies all-the-time channel is showing Touch of Evil. Commercial-free, no less. (Lottery tickets.) It’s at one of the parts where Janet Leigh is alone in the room at the motel in the middle of nowhere.
Instead of drawing obvious parallels, I take the longest shower you can imagine. Hottest, too. I leave the bathroom light off but the door open and the TV on. Marlene Dietrich tells Orson Welles his future is all used up.
I turn my face into the stream and feel the drops beating against my eyelids like rain on windows. I open my mouth and let it fill with water and swallow and then do it again. I shut the water off, wrap myself in a towel, sit down on the edge of the still-made bed, and watch the rest of the movie. It’s the last scene, where Charlton Heston is walking through the river, holding the tape recorder up to keep it dry and then Orson Welles hears his own recorded voice echoing off the stone arches of the bridge, then the big shootout.
Dietrich again: “What does it matter what you say about people?”
She has all the best lines in this movie.
“But I didn’t tell you the last part yet,” I say to Jack.
“Okay,” he says, “hang on real quick while I load the drier.” It’s Tuesday night. We’re back at his place after a nice dinner, and it’s looking like I’ll stay over. There are some things I left here on another occasion that I can wear to work tomorrow. Jack tossed my items in with some laundry of his own, so they’ll be fresh and clean.
I’m telling him all about my weekend away, except for a few things about Bruce that I don’t tell.
“Okay,” he says when he returns from the other room.
“Okay,” I say, and give him back his spot on the couch so I can snuggle up to him once he’s settled. “So I’m on the way back home.
“I don’t really need to stop but I guess I just want to. It feels more like a trip when you do, and otherwise the drive isn’t that long. I’m sipping on a strawberry soda I bought from the machine at the rest pavilion, sitting on a picnic table—not on the bench at the table, but actually on the tabletop itself, with my feet on the bench.
“Maybe ten feet away there’s another picnic table. They’re both poured concrete, gray, with dried bird shit and old graffiti and everything on them. Anyway I’m alone at my table but this other one’s full. A whole family. Mom, dad, three kids, plus another adult. An aunt I guess, mom’s sister or else dad’s. That’s what I decide while I’m watching them. Oh, and also that one of the kids is hers, though I can’t tell which. They’re all six of them eating sandwiches and spooning out chicken salad and potato salad from these plastic containers, passing things around, eating cubes of watermelon from a big Tupperware. It’s warmer off the coast, but still pretty chilly. They’re all in jackets and sweaters, having this kind of summer picnic while dressed for fall in the middle of this cold spring, and I think that’s part of why I like watching them. They’re apple-cheeked but getting through it. Nobody is even complaining that I can see.
“Now the one woman is wiping the kids off and loading them back into the family minivan, which looks like a rental. The man is helping, so I decide he must be that one’s husband. The other woman is cleaning up the lunch things all alone. She stacks up the dirty paper plates, gathers up the plastic utensils and puts them on top of that stack, then pops the lids back on the containers of food.
“The garbage cans are up at the pavilion, so she has to walk past my table. I’m finishing my strawberry soda, holding it straight up to get the last of it. She pauses before me. I put the can down on the table.
“‘You want some chicken salad, ma’am?’ she asks me. ‘There’s quite a bit left over.’
“I’m looking at her, silent, like I’m thinking, and I am, but what I’m thinking isn’t about her at all. I’m thinking to myself that when I get back on the road I can either go back to my life or I can turn out of the rest stop into the northbound lane of traffic and just go. I know you don’t like hearing it but it’s true, that’s what I was thinking. There are so many places I’ve never even seen.
“‘It won’t keep,’ she says. ‘We’re not taking it with us. It will go to waste.’
“It actually looks like good chicken salad, and I am hungry, having left the beach late that morning without eating first. All I have in me is strawberry soda.
“‘I saw you watching us,’ she says. ‘We’re good, clean people and I know this is what you want.’
“And she’s right, but I still don’t move to take the food. I don’t know what it is, and I guess I’ll wonder about it for a long time. I mean, I’m not scared of germs, strangers, or anything. So why can’t I let myself say yes?”
JEWELS FLASHING IN THE NIGHT OF TIME
+
Summer, 2004
+
I loosen my grip on Andrea’s neck and tell her, If you were with me I’d only hurt you when you wanted me to and she says, Then what would be the point? Her voice is a shred. She clenches around me like a raised fist when I cut her air supply again.
A different day:
I’m thinking about that song “Debaser” by the Pixies and repeating the chorus under my breath while I work—“debaser, debaser, DEBASER, debaser”—which I guess doesn’t sound like much, but you’ve got to imagine it the way I do, which is with a melody.
Or that’s what I hear whenever Brendan walks into the store. Chords fill the air, ooze like oil from a slab of deli meat. It isn’t like angels singing and little pink hearts floating around my head or whatever. It’s more like I’m imagining his theme music. We both hate the classic rock that 101.9 plays, but it’s the only station our crappy radio gets. And that’s a lame thing to hate, probably, but it’s what we have in common, and it is good, finally, just to pass minutes with music—any kind—because in silence you fall out of time. No. It’s the other way. You don’t fall out, you fall in. You get stuck, like running through a field and you twist your ankle on a rock. And you just lay there.
So he walks in at the start of his shift while I’m pumping the meat slicer and sort of thinking about him. He’s in the mix, let’s say. The slicer is converting a length of capicola—long as my arm and nearly thick as both of his—into sandwich-ready slices of the same.
I’m pumping the meat slicer with my right arm, catching the paper-thin rounds of capicola in my left hand—both hands gloved—and tossing the slices with measured gestures. Flicks of the wrist. Each little disc into one of three piles. The boss calls them stacks, but that’s because when he does this it all stacks neatly. When I do it there is a mess and when I’m finished the slices of meat make tall zigzagging decks that sway like skyscrapers and need to be straightened before they can be wrapped in clear plastic and put away in the cooler. The decks get shuffled smooth and perfect, like the space of skin between Brendan’s navel and the waist of his skater pants. He’s maddening,
constantly adjusting himself or stretching his arms all the way up so the bottom of his shirt pulls up, his pants slung so low, the better part of his boxers is exposed, but even the underwear doesn’t go any higher than his pale bony hips. How old is he? It almost doesn’t matter. He’ll look fifteen until he’s thirty.
Leaving work:
Maybe I’m whistling that song again. Down the street a little ways a man standing at a collapsible table is signing people up for credit cards, offering tee shirts and cheap Walkmans as a signing bonus, wincing in the relentless sun, mopping his forehead with a hairy forearm. I scribble gibberish on the form and take my little radio. He calls out to me that I didn’t show him a driver’s license, or something else he needs to verify something else. And also that I took his good blue pen. I ignore him and cross the street.
My thing:
I like to read out loud. I know Story of the Eye practically by heart but fuck that because holding the book is what’s so good. It starts to get heavier in your hands as you work up to the moment when it is time to put it down. This isn’t a fetish like I can’t live without it. I just mean that it’s so good. The words fill you like water and they reach deep into you like a surgeon would. And nobody loves it like Andrea does. With nothing but Bataille between us I picture our minds over-bleeding like the heart of a Venn diagram. I could pin Andrea with a phrase if I chose carefully enough, but that would compromise my favorite conception of her—as a shifting mystery that dances and rings like a wealth of glass, shattering. She’s my Simone. That is, when she’s not off somewhere with goddamn motherfucking Will.
At the library:
I stake out a back corner with Heart of Darkness and my new Walkman. It has those little buds that go right in your ear. I thumb through the wavelengths, past the classic rock, over now to AM, searching for Rumsfeld. And this also, said Marlow suddenly, has been one of the dark places of the earth. I guess the juxtaposition is heavy-handed, but whatever.
I can’t find Rumsfeld, but some radio personality is reading a list of the atrocities depicted in the photos that have surfaced, in the videos and other photos that are as yet only rumored. Images of horror, and their clinically disinterested annotations, fly across wires and airwaves; the electronic pulses and micropulses like the steady beat of flapping wings, and I imagine storks bearing the names of unnamed methods, dropping each into the fore of the mind where it lingers for just a moment like jewels flashing in the night of time (thus Conrad) or a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless (thus Bataille).
I flip to the end pages of the book, the blank part, fish the credit man’s pen from my jeans pocket, and start to copy down the list as I hear it: these are the activities with which the poor or underachieving tiers of my graduating class have lately been, in the name of God and country, filling their days:
Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees. During the orgy shards of glass had left deep bleeding cuts in two of us. Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol; Pouring cold water on naked detainees; Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; Threatening male detainees with rape; Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick. Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
“And even if these allegations are true,” the radio personality says, “what people need to understand is that we are in a war right now, and that means that certain—uh—exceptions must be” and I sort of zone out for a while. “Let’s take some calls,” he says later, and people either agree or disagree with him.
So the end pages are scrawled solid. This documentation will sit sight unseen, lost in a long row of classics, like the factory-sealed deli meats when they sit at the back of the cooler until we need them or they go bad first but we try to use them anyway. This book, I see, has not been checked out in years, and whoever bothered with it on June 7, 1988, left no mark in the text to indicate if it left him with an opinion, feeling, impression, or sense. I know that just means he is a good public citizen, respectful of the library, but I wish instead he’d left a note or tagged a signature, anything to bridge the gulf of years.
But on the other hand the list isn’t like unique or really original. I’ve seen worse stuff in movies. The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empires; the horror and despair in so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, and what greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! It kind of kills me to think about too much. The fascination of the abomination—you know. But I have changes of heart sometimes. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate. Suddenly short of breath as I imagine someone discovering my list and them imagining me and what I was thinking as I scribbled. If they could even know, somehow. I have never had any aptitude for what is known as striking a pose. Or maybe I’m not ashamed; just really careful. I check the book out and take it home, not intending to ever bring it back.
Some night:
We’re messing around and she starts wishing aloud that we had some rope to play with. I think my belt, the braided kind, can suffice. She makes fun of my idea. A couple loops and twists later there she is, wrists bound behind her, tits stuck thrust forward. She’s surprised, pleased; shakes them a little. I leave her underwear on and knock her around some, watching it darken.
I flip her on her back and wave my cock in her face. “No,” she says, “not in this bed, my boyfriend was just in this bed.” That’s part of it, I guess. I untie her after a while. She’s finishing me off. I’m on my back, she’s got a hand on my cock more or less like you’d hold a joystick. In my head I’m sort of flashing on some video games I’ve played. When the jizz arcs, some splatters the wall. “Goddamnit,” she says, then: “Well, you wrecked your fucking shirt, too.”
Once more with feeling, one of us says, and the other thinks this is just so funny.
My walk home:
When it’s very cold and I hock up and spit a good one there’s this blast of condensed breath that explodes out like a wintry comet behind the launch of saliva and phlegm and I think of what I think tracer bullet trails look like—every fifth round—and how it would be to have a gun that fired tracers, or a reason to have a gun that fired tracers. Yeah, that’s it, what I’m really after: not the gun, but the reason for having it. But right now it isn’t even cold so I guess I’m imagining that part too, and just spitting.
A different day:
Brendan is doubled over, laughing or pretending to laugh. Waving his arms around. Some theatrical skater bullshit. He puts gloves on, makes a joke about the meat slicer.
Today we are the book
ends of a four-person operation, five if you include the girl who works the register, who is hot and mostly ignores us. We both notice when she looks over our way. She takes the orders and the money and a cigarette break every twenty-five minutes. Someone else toasts the bread and applies the meat and cheese I’ve sliced, another adds the vegetables or whatever else. Jalapeños and honey mustard; low-fat mayonnaise or that orange shit that goes on a Reuben. Brendan wraps them when they’re finished, stuffs each in a to-go bag with a slice of pickle wrapped in crinkly waxed paper. What this all translates to is that he and I don’t talk much. We are the poles of the production line, separated by the length and specifics of the gourmet sandwich gestation process. Have you had your way today? With who?
Meanwhile:
In Abu Ghraib, which is a dirty building somewhere in a desert, there are former AT RISKs once condemned by every guidance counselor. The grandchildren of immigrants who had the anarchism beaten out of them by cops in Chicago. Ambivalent patriots and even some true believers. And they’ve all been given loaded weapons and the keys to small rooms containing people that, as a matter of policy, they must learn to hate or else they already do.
I work and I work and I stare at this whirling blade and I think about everything while I slice the
—Ham
Which is roughly the shape of a loaf of bread, though wider and heavier and longer and pink as a boiled baby and is 11 percent water and comes wrapped in this plastic with a red crisscross design on it and when you slice it open a stream of orange-gray liquid spills out and then you pull the whole wrapping off and it makes a wet huck noise and a little more liquid spills into the stainless steel washbasin and the blade goes whir-whir when you start it up and you have to figure out what’s the good number to set the slicer to so that the meat slices are each three-quarters of an ounce. (Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet) and
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