Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

by Justin Taylor

  —Turkey Breast

  I think of that one soldier, the girl, with the cig on her lip and that smile (thumbs-up!) and I can’t help but think if she is so evil or lucky or something else I can’t imagine and how the turkey breast is roughly the size and weight of a bowling ball that has been squashed a bit—ovalish—it has a brown skin to simulate having been oven-roasted and it is 15 percent water and when you cut the plastic off the liquid spills out golden-brown and then you need to stick it in the freezer for a while so the water in it freezes (for the first time I saw her “pink and dark” flesh cooling) because if you cut it while it’s warm the water will run right out of it and leave minuscule paths and caverns through the wide pale center of the shiny wet bird-ball so that when you run it whiz-whiz-whiz over the blade it will make slices that fall into your waiting medical-gloved hand as streamers of turkey-ribbon or small piles of turkey-rags because it, like everything, loses coherence in the aftermath of losing essential waters attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture and okay duh it’s not like the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib were the first people in history to find themselves naked at the wrong end of a dog leash and

  —Roast Beef

  maybe what I really need to be thinking about Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture is what Andrea is thinking or if Will is hitting her and if he is is she thinking about Threatening male detainees with rape me and how each time

  —Pepperoni

  is like a first time: I wake up with her smell on me after dreaming of her smell; I know her body so well I could shop for her but every time she undresses I’m thrilled again to learn what she looks like naked and when she’s on her back, knees up, thighs like a foyer, I always find myself wondering despite all previous knowledge how will she taste, how will it be when our slick skins finally press hard and the act and all thoughts about the act meld into some third thing—

  She is a magic trick and I am either the magician or the crowd.

  My shift ends in the early afternoon but Brendan works till four o’clock so I get to say good-bye to him, passing close in the narrow corridor. If we were both skaters I guess we’d slap fives or I’d hit him in the back of the head for a prank or something. He wraps a steaming steak sandwich in tin foil. “Later,” I say and he says yeah, peace, or whatever. Puts the sandwich in a paper bag. Takes it back out and goes, “Ahh fuck, fuck this shit.”

  A mailman on his lunch break is waiting for the steak sandwich Brendan is doing triage on. Maybe the kid who works the microwave forgot to melt the provolone cheese. It’s bad when you forget something, but it’s worse if you put the wrong thing on. Like if the guy said no mustard but you doused it and then realized. The whole thing gets junked and you start again, and the mailman just stands there. In the far corner on the shop’s big screen, Rumsfeld is being grilled about the torture photos. The boss has closed caption on and the volume off. Anyway it doesn’t matter. I’m out the door.

  Phone call:

  “I think Will knows.”

  “Knows what? I mean how?”

  “You fucking bruised me, is how.”

  “How can he tell which bruises are his and which are mine?”

  “What—Fuck. I don’t know. He probably can’t. But he thinks something.”

  “Leave him. I’ll be good to you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “No but we could—”

  Click.

  Numerology:

  Class of 2000, that’s us. Me, Andrea, Will—one for each zero. They raised us to worship our own greatness, to believe ourselves touched by fortune. Destiny, whatever. They put all their faith in the calendar’s promise, that glistening fake-out, and we came of age in time to vote but it turned out to be the one when votes stopped counting, if they ever did, and they sent us off to school and we went and then we finished and there was nowhere left to go. The streets are empty. The air is humid, overripe, stinking. Our dead-end jobs have cut us back to summer hours. Anyone with anywhere else to be is already there. Florida! Goddamn.

  Is it any wonder we’re going feral?

  Andrea is downing a shot of Absolut and I am telling her about Brendan. She puts the empty glass down, goes, “I fucking love skaters, why are they all so fucking hot?” and opens the front door. Porch light spills in. She becomes obscure in a personal cloudbank of Marlboro exhaust. I follow her. “Remember Brian Lumes?” she says, speaking of skaters.

  I set us up with a couple more shots.

  “And he had that fucking haircut,” she says. “The weird long front lock that went down his face and it was like his head was melting.” And we used to make so much fun of him but he didn’t care because he was probably fucked up on ecstasy or else just stoned.

  Andrea takes her shot. I take mine. I guess she got out of whatever it was that Will suspected, or maybe that was just some wild shit he said when they were in a fight about something else. Probably he thinks his girl would never cheat on him, but that it still makes sense for him to call her a whore.

  Will:

  It’s better when she’s in a fight with him. She comes over alone and gives me her full attention. I hate Will, obviously, because he has her and because sometimes he hurts her, but he’s good to keep at a distance because he can always get the best drugs and because he has her. She doesn’t love him but won’t consider leaving, so what’s the point of fighting him or something? I like to think I could save her if she’d let me but Will and I are her two worlds and she mostly keeps us apart. I don’t even know if she likes him. I try to imagine them sitting on a loveseat, wearing their socks but not their shoes, watching a sitcom, twirling angel hair pasta up from blue bowls, and my mind goes to static, a bright blank seething wall.

  We weren’t always like this, but whatever we used to be is hard to focus on from where I’m standing, like trying to imagine what the last guy who checked out the Conrad book was thinking or the credit card guy’s eyes getting stung shut by sweat so he doesn’t get a decent enough look at me to hail a cop and report the stolen radio. It may even be somehow that whatever Will does to her makes her want what she wants with me—a thought I can hardly stomach. What she and I have is a trust thing, roughly.

  Andrea and I are in facing chairs, holding ashtrays, and for a weird minute I start wishing she weren’t here so I could be reading or on the net trying to score more photos (because I think there are secrets to be learned, and that I can learn them, even if the secrets don’t want to be learned, and I love to learn secrets and then own the truth) but then my attention snaps back either to whatever Andrea’s saying or to the shooting-star tattoos. One per hip. Andrea swears the left one is a little fucked up because the tattoo guy did it second and by that time the Vicodin Will gave her had worn off so she was flinching. This is bullshit because Andrea doesn’t flinch. Period. Do anything. And besides, I don’t see the flaw. I see twin comets, dive-bombing like predatory birds past the waterline at the rim of her tight low-rise black jeans, the arc of the stars’ descent such that if her body is the universe the galaxial collision must blaze in the far astral reach of her hidden cunt.

  Across the street, through a window with a gauzy curtain, I see the silhouettes of some couple lost in whatever makes them unique to each other. Andrea gives voice to her boredom. There is noise like a party coming from the other direction. We decide to go and see.

  Getting lucky:

  Kids smoke cigarettes and dope. It’s a little apartment building that started life as a large house. My friend Melissa lives on the bottom right. Somebody’s big brother or sister must live here. I take Andrea’s hand just because I want to; because I just want to. I say something about keeping her close to me, not losing her in the crowd, which she ignores. And pulls her hand free. A boy in a shadow says something about her being sexy and I turn toward him and he turns away.

  Brendan’s with some friends. A tall, unattractive girl in an expensive black miniski
rt and red bra hurtles down the stairs, barely keeping upright, screaming the name of a person she needs to fucking talk to right-a-fucking-way. The disinterested skaters on the lawn tell her that guy ain’t here, and to lift her skirt up. Negotiations begin. Soon a tall kid, mildly Hispanic, has the shirtless girl pinned on the grass, off to a side. Brendan is a particular kind of embodied dream, hitching his pants up and sidling toward us, mumbling something like “Hey, it’s the guy that cuts the meat yeah hey” and puts out a hand that I slap five. The crack of palm on palm reverberates in my head. Keep it together, hold your shit.

  “Lame party,” I say.

  Brendan: “Huh?” From closer up, he’s clearly zoned.

  “Come with us to my place,” I say. “It’s just over there,” and I point around the corner. “We’ll, uh, chill out or whatever.” Brendan looks across his scatter of friends, some of them drinking bottles of domestic beer, others presumably loaded some other way.

  “Well,” he says evasively, but comes. Bops his head a little, hearing some dumb internal music we probably wouldn’t be into. I let go of Andrea. Nobody talks. We round the corner.

  One time:

  I’m reading Story at the sandwich shop on my break and sort of watching Brendan in the background. I’m underlining something (these orgasms were as different from normal climaxes as, say, the mirth of savage Africans from that of Occidentals) but then it gets busy and I’m back on the clock, so I grab a packet of sugar from a little dish of them and stick it in the book for a bookmark, and then later, I’m reading to Andrea (It is not astonishing that the bleakest and most leprous aspects of a dream are merely an urging) and I get this idea about if we could be sweet for a change so I tell her I’m going to sugar her cunt down and lick it clean. I pour out the contents of the packet and lean in. For a moment I’m consumed by the genius conflict of her salts with the sweetness, but then a foul taste takes over and I gag badly. I choke. She props herself up on an elbow, nipples wilting, and reads the torn empty packet: “You asshole,” she says. “The pink ones aren’t sugar they’re Sweet’N Low.”

  We get to my place. I run in to use the bathroom but stop to put on CNN real quick. Footage of congressmen. But they’re not showing the pictures. I have all the pictures, I don’t need them to be broadcast in order to see them, but it makes me feel better to see them on TV. Even though the good parts are blurred out. Somehow, the broadcast makes everything okay. Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, I think to myself. Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee. I don’t need the TV to tell me the list. I have memorized the list. I have collected all the photos. I shut the TV off.

  Or:

  On a different day if I’m by myself, I might take the Bataille and Conrad books and put them side by side, maybe break the two spines trying to make their words merge—but they won’t. You can get drunker, push harder—they just dry rub. So you turn back to that desert that is offered to you, glowing.

  I think of the cool hum-whine of the meat slicer and of the similar noise my computer makes. Pictures only show you. They don’t let you feel it. And I feel it. Or want to how badly?

  These are glimpses of what I’m thinking about as I light another cigarette off Andrea’s, offer one to Brendan, which he accepts, dodge the dirty look she gives me. We sip strong gin and tonics. Andrea and I are both curious to see what Brendan is capable of. I know she likes the idea of Brendan. And the physique. She’s probably wondering if he’ll let us hit him.

  I grip his shoulder in a guy way, briefly, but dig into the muscle to really feel it, like testing a melon or a cut of meat at the grocery store. There’s some give, then tautness—that’s him flexing. More or less what I had imagined he felt like, but it’s good to know for sure. For a second I’m convinced that he’s figured us out, but he downs the last of his gin and tonic, hands me the empty glass, eyes Andrea. “Have another drink,” I say, and he laughs.

  I go to the kitchen and pour another round, but insist we all also take a shot, and Brendan visibly crosses some line, so I push him backward and he falls into Andrea, all of us laughing, and she says we should think of something fun to do.

  Me and Andrea have a little aside while Brendan is drunkenly browsing the stuff on my bedroom walls. Or maybe that’s him trying to stay standing, or maybe that’s him on the bed. I want to try Conrad. She thinks this is insane, even cheesy, which I think is unfair, but you can’t culture a pissy drunk, so it’s old Bataille. We sit down in a little row on the edge of my bed, Brendan, our Marcelle, in the middle. We’re basically holding him upright.

  I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual…and the next day there were such dark rings around my eyes…so bluntly craved any upheaval…I ought to say, nevertheless, that we waited a long time…Simone’s ass, raised aloft, did strike me as an all-powerful entreaty…Only now did we tear loose from our extravagant embrace to hurl ourselves upon a self-abandoned body…Marcelle, who no longer hid anything but her sobs…

  I steal peeks of what is going on over there, getting hot myself, waiting for Andrea to make a move. She takes Brendan’s hand and places it on top of my crotch, where it sort of strokes while I keep reading—We understood one another, Simone and I, and we were certain…I ought to say that we were all very drunk and completely bowled over by what was going on…“You’re totally insane, little man,” she cried, “I’m not interested—here, in a bed like this, like a housewife and mother! I’ll only do it with Marcelle!”—then Andrea and I clasp hands around Brendan’s cock, which at some point came out of his pants, which are in a bunch at his feet. Then she pulls her hand back. She stands up. I grab her by her wrist and swing her back toward the bed. She goes easy and sort of gets flung at Brendan, who is mostly insensible. She lands in a sexy sprawl, knocking him backward, pressing his cock between their bodies. I pull her back upright, holding her against my body, pulling her shirt up and her bra down. “Nice,” the skater says, or really croaks, and she kicks him hard. I knock her down, tear at her clothing. It comes off easily enough, without her help I mean, and I’m glad to feel the wet heat radiating off her as I get her pants off. The underwear is expensive, frilly, and this disappoints or provokes me. When she’s naked the tattoos lose their enormous power, and for a long terrible moment I realize (again) that this was better to dream about than to live through and I wish that it was over or that I would die suddenly but I force myself to unrealize that thing so it is no longer a fact or a truth but just one more of the jewels flashing in the night of time and force her facedown so I can take her from behind while Brendan half-heartedly grabs at my balls and after I pull out he licks me clean, and I think of 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 and I want him to have her, too, but he can’t get very hard so I sort of guide him in and out for a little while but then give up and having accepted the situation without even trying to fathom the mystery we curl up together at the far end of my bed and he passes out while Andrea wipes herself off and gathers her clothing and I watch her get dressed and I watch her as she walks out of my bedroom and I let her go, but then I sort of realize something and jump up from the bed and run after her and catch her in the living room, right by the front door, which is open, the doorway frames us and the yellow porch light makes a sickly bath, the collar of her shirt all stretched to ruin and her face puffy and I’m naked and who knows what I look like and I say, “What just happened?” even though by a sort of shared modesty, Simone and I had always avoided talking about the most important objects of our obsessions and my voice sounds fucked up, like it’s too flat or maybe too emotional, so I try to put it another way: “That was what you wanted, right?”

  WHISTLE THROUGH YOUR TEETH AND SPIT

  Riot’s moseying down East Fourth Street, past the KGB Bar,
eating a burrito he found wrapped in tin foil in a garbage can at the corner of Third Avenue. He’s filthy and thin. The burrito’s beef so he doesn’t want to be seen with it, because even though he’s personally freegan the crowd at the benches in Tompkins Square includes several hardcore vegans who will all give him shit, and frankly he isn’t in the mood. So he’s dawdling. Not like he’s in some hurry.

  Riot wears an eye patch and a grungy white leather jacket he found in a giveaway box at the Bowery Mission and subsequently augmented—in Sharpie, it should go without saying—so his favorite bands (Black Flag, Choking Victim, etc.) are represented up and down the sleeves. The whole back of the thing is given over to one single statement: 9/11 WAS A REICHSTAG, a subject that he is prepared to talk about for as long as you are prepared to listen, and then some. Actually, it’s pretty convincing until he gets into this tired shit about the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yeah man, we know all about the Israel connection.

  Now he’s at the southwest corner of East Fourth and First. He finishes the burrito, balls the foil up in his palm, tosses the ball into a green metal garbage can identical to the can he pulled the meal out of mere minutes ago, crosses First against the light, causing several cab drivers and one tricked-out SUV to honk at him. At these receding vehicles he flips birds—one after another until each is accounted for. The light changes, he crosses north on Fourth against that light, and then starts east again. When he hits Avenue A he turns back north and when he gets to St. Mark’s Place he decides that maybe he still doesn’t really want to go hang out with the kids in the park. What he really wants—check that, needs—is a bathroom.