The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  “You were supposed to get married to him,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The Brow Beater. You were the one he was telling me about, the girl back home he was going to marry.”

  Mina stood there in front of me, shaking her head slightly until she finally let out a sad laugh. Then she went to the kitchen and started cleaning. I hadn’t noticed the mess: greasy sheets of tinfoil, flour-blasted cutting boards, dishes piled in the sink like a cairn. She flipped on the faucet, which hissed and hissed as she spoke.

  “I’m feeling very stupid,” she said. “I thought maybe you’re coming here because you know where he is. But you don’t.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Then you’re here to tell me what I’m already knowing?”

  “No,” I said. “You told me you had one half of his story, and that I had the other half, and that together we could find out what happened to him. You said that, right?”

  “But you’re not telling me anything new.”

  “I’m trying, Mina. I really am. Will you shut off the faucet? Will you listen to me? I didn’t mean to come here. You asked for his life in America and I couldn’t tell you before, but I can tell you now, because I didn’t realize who you were. I didn’t realize you were the one he talked about.”

  At last she cut the water. “Try, then. Tell me what you’re trying to say.”

  I couldn’t know where to begin, how to explain my friendship with the man she’d loved. My head was blitzed by small, seemingly meaningless details of our time together, like how The Brow Beater loved the smell of gasoline so much he splashed a little on his wrists every time we filled up the tank. We used to cook steaks on the engine of my old Catalina—unbolting the heat shield from the exhaust manifold where all the cylinders come together, hiking the steak right underneath the gasket—and the meat would come out seasoned with petrol. What else? He chewed like my brother, back to front. I’d tell him again and again how much he and Gil would’ve loved each other, and he’d shine—absolutely shine. He saved me in about five hundred fights I picked in bars and locker rooms around the country, and I saved him that once, during the debacle in Duluth. When my Catalina finally broke down, we picked out my Ranger together. It’s half his—maybe that’s what I should’ve told Mina. The truck in front of her apartment complex—half of it belonged to the man who loved her. I tried to teach him how to drive once, but he refused. I think he liked looking out the window too much. He collected arrowheads and subway tokens and all sorts of touristy crap, and when he took off, he left all of that in the truck, in that red fanny pack he used to carry his money in. And there was the real point of my story, the best forgetting I ever did, and maybe, if I started telling Mina the small surrounding memories, I’d get around to telling her the center.

  But as long as I could remember, even before my life in the wrestling business, all my talking—my honest talking, that is—happened on the road. Maybe it was the enclosure of the car, intimate as any confessional booth I’d feared as a child. Or maybe it was the movement involved, the sense that, since we were heading from one place to another, there followed a human impulse to match that movement in other, less geographical ways. Maybe that movement, that invisible shift in a person, happens most naturally through honest conversation, and so on the road, we reveal things—I reveal things—we otherwise might’ve kept buried at home. I asked Mina, “Is there any way we can keep talking out in my truck?”

  Mina just shook her head. From behind the sink, she looked at me, looked down at the dishes, and turned the faucet back on. There came again the hiss of the spray.

  I could feel Smokey’s ribs expanding, a life I’d arranged.

  “You know,” I said, “you really broke his heart, Mina.”

  “You should be going.”

  “You did that,” I went on. “You broke him. You didn’t, you know, marry him like he wanted, and he was out here all alone. I mean, did you ever think of that? He didn’t know anybody out here. I was his only friend, you understand? I was here for him, but otherwise, he was all alone. Turn that water off, now, and tell me why you didn’t marry him. What took you so long to get here? He waited for you for a long time, you know, years, and he never touched another woman, I swear to God, he was a good man, and he waited for you, and how come you failed him? Turn that water off and tell me why you failed to join him here. Why did you stay home and marry that old man instead? Why’d you do that to him? Tell me why he deserved that. Tell me why The Brow Beater deserved what you did to him. Shut off the water and tell me what happened. You tell me!”

  The cat leaped out of my arms, and Mina jumped back, startled, cutting her finger on a knife she’d been scrubbing. I tried to help her run the blood off under the running water, but she held her wound and said, “Go—please, go.”

  “If we could just talk in my truck,” I said, “we could talk the truth. I can tell you what I know, and you can explain your story to me.”

  Mina sucked the cut at the side of her finger. With her elbow, she knocked off the water. “Explaining a story is killing a story. Same thing. I’m not killing my story for a man like you, who is only talking the truth in his car. Goodbye, Mr. Krill. Go.”

  In all my life, I’d fought with only one other woman, and that hadn’t gone much better.

  According to almost everyone, my brother was killed in December 1950. His girlfriend back home, however, disbelieved the news. It was a surprising act of delusion from an otherwise bright, levelheaded kid. She was only seventeen, Joyce, but she was headed to UC Berkeley, and her voice had a tremor every time she steered the conversation toward something she cared about—geology, art, or politics—and the few times I saw her before Gil shipped out, she had, like a pilot’s eject button, a book within reach, just in case the conversation bored her and she had to make a sudden escape. I was ready to write off her fantasy about Gil’s survival of his own death as a kind of melodramatic performance of grief, but she didn’t seem to be grieving. She seemed clear-eyed and precise, as if she had access to an entirely different set of facts.

  After Gil’s body came back, she went off to California but kept in touch with my parents, who for years had considered her a daughter of their own. It was in those letters, dating from the ’50s, that I learned Joyce’s point of view regarding Gil and the official story of his death.

  By the time I got ahold of her old letters to my mother, I had already traded the fishing vessel for the road, wrestling the territories. This was in 1961—I’d come home briefly to help my father clear out my mother’s things, and found the letters from Joyce. At first her letters simply proposed the idea that Gil hadn’t died, that he was still alive and held captive, perhaps, someplace in South Asia, that there had been a mistake involving the body. Those ideas seemed to me desperate and sad but not at all concerning, a kind of hopeful fib she was laying over my mother like a shawl.

  Then her language changed. After graduating from Berkeley in 1955, two years after the war had ended, her letters took on a new, more menacing tone. She had proof, she wrote to my mother, that the United States government had handed over a significant number of soldiers and sailors to the Communists in Korea as part of an arms deal against the Soviets, proof that Gil had essentially been traded like a chip at a casino, and that the United States government, in an effort to cover up their treasonous bargain, had sent home false remains.

  My mother, who had always loved Gil better than me, took to believing her. She stopped cooking for my father, and when my father started cooking for her, she hardly ate a bite. She bought a book on Korean and spent most of her waking hours practicing in the dim light under the kitchen window. She had a cat she adored but let it go one day into the woods behind the barn. According to my father, the cat came back a few times, but my mother shooed it away in Korean. Her last years, all she wanted to do was travel to the peninsula, as if disentangling a conspiracy or negotiating with a Communist regime or raising the dead from thei
r graves—as if every miracle were just a language you could learn from a book. She expanded her vocabulary, and she corresponded with Joyce, but she never did get to Korea.

  I’d been on the road and hadn’t kept in touch with Joyce, which allowed me to cut through any concern I might’ve felt for her mental health so that I could jump straight to my own bleeding anger at her manipulation of my dying mother’s heart.

  So when my schedule brought me to Tucson, where Joyce had gone after college, I looked her up. It was 1962, and I found her working behind the desk at a bookstore, shoeless and tanned, splitting a cigarette with a woman wearing a feather in her hair. Joyce saw me and burst into tears. “I thought you were him,” she said.

  “That’s not ever going to happen,” I said. I told her never again to lie about my brother. I told her what she’d done to my aging mother, lying to her about the death of her son, was evil. “You turned her grief into poison,” I said. “You made his death last longer than death.”

  She was wearing those lapis lazuli earrings, blue as planets and flecked with gold. “And you’re blameless?” she said. “You, who found an endless road so that you never had to stop leaving?”

  The woman beside her took the cigarette. “Only two reasons people come in here,” she said, and Joyce gave me my options: “So tell me, Terry—did you come here to confess something, or are you just shopping for a book?”

  On my way out, I kicked a pile of new-age paperbacks. I left as though I’d never see Joyce again, but I must’ve known the truth. All we’d done was start a new angle.

  When I got to my truck, I realized how late it was, how I’d only meant to spend an hour away from the jewelry store, but almost four hours had gone by. It was all right, I told myself. I’d sweep by to retrieve Fuji, apologize to a pair of women I’d never see again, and drive clear on through to Johnny Trumpet’s bungalow. I was finished, I thought, with The Brow Beater.

  In the back camper of my truck, I found that red fanny pack of his, filled with tchotchkes. I plucked it like a weed and headed back up to Mina’s apartment one last time. When I opened the door, she was sitting among the floral furniture, bandaging her finger.

  “I’m leaving,” I said, “but here’s his American memorabilia if you want it. Throw it out if you don’t, because that’s what I was going to do with it.” I tossed the fanny pack onto the carpet beside her, and the zipper came loose, letting free some of The Brow Beater’s cheap collectibles: a halved seashell, several mismatched dice, an arrowhead. Mina stood from her armchair. She knelt to the floor. She picked up one of the dice and then said something in her language.

  The rest of the bag, she picked up and dumped out on the counter in the kitchenette. A couple dozen more dice came tumbling out, blue and red and green and white and black and clear. Mina said, “I’m not knowing how to drive, Mr. Krill. Can you take me somewhere?”

  I could’ve told her I had just decided to be done with The Brow Beater. I explained that my cat was waiting for me, three hours late, at a jewelry store in Glendale, and that I was expected to be in the desert in the morning for work, gone from the city of freeways altogether and forever. But I was curious about the dice, and I thought taking Mina on the road might allow me to tell her what I’d come to tell her, which I couldn’t tell her outside of the truck. I said, “All right, I’ll take you, but I’m picking my cat up first, and we’re leaving right now.”

  She told me to wait at the gas station around the corner. She said she had to cover for herself at home, tell her husband that she was off to buy more food or liquor for their friends on the roof. She put all of The Brow Beater’s things back into the zipped bag and hid the thing in a cupboard beneath the sink.

  I said, “If you’re not at the gas station in ten minutes, I’m leaving without you.”

  Again I left the building and crossed the street to my truck. I looked up and saw the orange sun pressing through the gray skim of the sky like a kiss through a shower door. Way up above me, on the roof of Mina’s building, I saw Shen looking down on me. I waved goodbye as I got into my truck, but he didn’t wave back.

  17

  The Mediterranean, 1980–1983

  Of the Four Eeks, Martik was the only one who lived alone, on the verge of Spata in a small house made of stone. The house stood in a fallow where a vintner once worked, and except for the northern wheatears searching for beetles where the grapevines once blossomed, Martik had no neighbors. Inside the house, there were no rooms but for the central space, which stretched just far enough to fit a toilet and sink near the south end and a slim bed near the oven. At the foot of the bed stood a table with a mismatched chair tucked underneath, and old farm equipment—a scythe, a shovel, and a spike aerator—leaned like kindling in one of the corners. When the oven was burning, every stone of the house glowed. That was Martik’s favorite feature of the house, the way the stones glowed when the oven was burning.

  Martik said so as he stoked the fire with the four spikes of the aerator, hurtling the smell of wood smoke into the glowing house like bees from a hive. He was speaking to his latest guest, who seemed to be listening and watching the flickering stones of the ceiling.

  The bed was too small, Martik thought. The feet—bound together with galvanized cable at the ankles—slumped off the edge of the mattress and onto the small table at the foot of the bed. The wrists were tied, too, and although Martik had left the mouth uncovered, his guest seemed uninterested in speaking. So Martik let him go on listening.

  “The man with the gun,” Martik said, jabbing at the fire, “the man with the gun who left after the binding, his name was Zatik. He’s an engineer from Aleppo. And I’m from Istanbul. I’m not as young as Zatik or as smart. It’s okay, though, because these are facts.”

  He’d grown up confused about facts, he said, because he’d learned one set of facts from his family, and another set of facts at school. To be an Armenian in Turkey was to learn to carry a weight on your tongue. Make it heavy. Slow it down. There, it was a serious crime to say the wrong word. Genocide. Insulting Turkishness, right there in the constitution. Textbooks piled with alternative histories. A light tongue would call them lies. A light tongue would get a boy’s parents taken away.

  Martik went to his knees at the oven, turning the wood with the aerator spikes.

  He’d left school and played football all day with the Turkish boys. They were kind enough to let him join, or else desperate enough for someone to play goaltender. They played fairly with him. But when they fought, when the knives came out, the worst insult they could think of was to tell a fellow Turk: You must have a secret Armenian in your family tree.

  He listened to those insults from the chicken-wire netting of the football goal. He wanted to hate those Turkish boys, wanted to fight them. But he didn’t. He couldn’t, in the end, blame them. They didn’t have the facts at home the way he did. They learned only what their teachers had been instructed to instruct them. In that way, Martik had always been a generous person. He would’ve been ignorant of the facts, too, if he’d been born a Turk. He would’ve imprisoned his parents, too.

  But he very much enjoyed playing goaltender. He never cared to score a goal of his own. He would rather protect a game than win one. He would grow up the same way, not an activist but a preservationist. That was what had drawn him to this role with Hagop Hagopian’s group. Not the ambition to change but the ambition to save.

  “I get each of my guests to say out loud the facts,” he said, still at the fire.

  The facts: Ottoman Turks systematically murdered and disappeared a million and a half Armenians beginning in 1915, destroying monuments and robbing the dead of their estates and their land, and their descendants continue perfecting the crime of erasure by denying the atrocities ever took place.

  In some ways, hearing the facts from his guests—especially his most difficult ones, his most unpersuadable—elated him. Each admission, regardless of motive, felt like saving a soul—not the raising of the dead but t
he release of the dead.

  In other ways, however, the truth left Martik feeling small. Another, more discomfiting truth seemed to be lurking beneath the others: no one but the victims wanted to do anything with the facts. Alliances with Turkey were growing around the world, not shrinking, and even sympathetic governments were willing to ignore its denial for the right price.

  Finally satisfied with the oven, Martik left the spiked end of the aerator in the fire and then stood. He dragged the mismatched chair from under the table, took a seat, and said, “Not that you don’t know the facts already.”

  “I was told Hagop Hagopian was coming to meet me here,” Avo finally said, “so I could explain.”

  “Explain?” Martik said. He wasn’t used to having conversations with his guests, but then again, this one was different. All his previous guests had been deniers. Without exception, he got an apology out of all of them. He used the old means. The ones their people had used on his. Symmetrical, that way. Different, this guest. Bigger, yes. But also: This wasn’t a denier. This was, without precedent, a fellow Armenian. “Explaining, I’ve found, is ineffective.”

  How much did his guest know, he asked, about methods of torture at the end of the Ottoman Empire? Falaka—foot whipping. Tecrit—isolation. Fingernail removal. Skin removal. Genital removal. Eye removal. Bodily revision, in a way. Bodily erasure.