by Atticus Lish
“What happened?”
“The fight didn’t go the way they thought it would.”
“You mean, you beat up two guys?”
“I find that when you know boxing and wrestling, you can do pretty well in most fights, and I knew boxing and wrestling.”
“That’s so awesome,” Corey said.
“A boy could never cry, even a young boy. No matter what was done to me, I could never cry, even when I was four or five years old.”
“That’s great. I have to be more like that.”
“By the time I was your age, it would have been unheard-of, even for a weaker kid. But I didn’t grow up with a mother like you.”
“I thought you had a mother.”
“That’s what it said on the box, but that wasn’t what was inside.”
“She was really psycho?”
“I don’t like that term psycho.”
Corey waited for Leonard to tell him a better term, but he didn’t. Instead, he told Corey, “You want to talk about everyone’s mother but yours.”
“I’ll talk about my mother! I mean, we both care for her, right? We wouldn’t say anything bad about her, right? So of course I’ll talk about her.”
“You’re such a perfect son.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Gloria got everything she wanted. No, really, you are perfect.”
“She’s just going through a bad time.”
“Yes, and you want people to say, ‘Oh, look at the perfect son helping his mother.’ ”
“No, I just want to help her for real. I don’t care what anyone says.”
“The noble son.”
“Hey, could we talk about something else?”
“Too tough for you?”
“No, I just feel strongly about it.” Silence held between them for a moment. Then Corey said, “You know, I tried to call you back in November. She needed help and you weren’t around. You never answered my phone call.”
“Oh, Corey, I am so sorry for not getting right back to you. Please give me another chance, it’ll never happen again. Would you like me to call you right now and apologize? Maybe I should apologize for creating you in the first place.”
“I care about my mother. What do you want?”
“Not much. Not much.”
“Did I offend you?”
“Corey, you couldn’t offend me if you tried.”
“Well, that’s good. Look, we started off with you telling me about your childhood. Why don’t we go back to that?”
“How ’bout I tell you about your childhood, Corey?”
“Okay. Fine.”
“Okay, fine. You were an accident.”
“It worked out for me.”
“Yeah, and you want to hear the kicker? I talked a certain somebody out of flushing you.”
“Your parents didn’t like you either, so I guess we’re the same,” Corey blurted. He was upset and didn’t want to talk anymore. He claimed not to be upset and left the room, saying he had homework.
* * *
—
After this, he began to look back at everything Leonard had said to him and question if it was true.
For instance, they’d had a recent conversation about the police. It had started when Leonard had been taking off his trousers because, he said, he didn’t want to wrinkle them for work. They were black polyester uniform trousers with a double blue line of piping down the legs. He folded them and laid them on his cop bag. He took out another pair of trousers and put them on. They were almost exactly the same as the original pair except they had a different style of piping: a single crimson line. Corey asked, “Why do you have two different kinds of cop pants?”
Leonard ignored the question, and Corey thought, Did I annoy him?
“I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Cops! They’re a bunch of pigs,” Leonard snarled. “The worst are the Cambridge Police Department. They’re some of the most despicable people in the world.”
Corey was astonished. Leonard told him not to be naïve. “I know certain pigs I’d kill without a second thought.”
“In Cambridge?”
“Without hesitation. I’m talking worthless people. Real human slime. The kind where you’d be doing the world a favor by blowing them away.”
“But what did they do?”
“They’re a corrupt organization. I began independently investigating them for racially profiling minority women. We have a lot of minority women on campus, and when they were going out into Cambridge, they were getting harassed. My investigation found the problem started with Chief Scumbag Joe LaFleur, who was basically giving days off in exchange for traffic stops. This is the caliber of man who thinks that Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers. Most of his officers wouldn’t understand the concept of being a capitalist stooge if you drew them a picture. So, doing my job as a peace officer working for one of the leading universities in America, I forward my investigation to my commanding officer. I tell him, we’ve got a problem here. We have a highly diverse campus. Many of our students are off-white girls. They’re getting clobbered out there. Let’s handle this diplomatically with the higher level of the Cambridge PD. Translation: Get off your ass and tell your golf buddy, LaFleur Fuckface, to quit coming down on these women of color. Next thing you know, I’m facing a disciplinary hearing, loss of pay, loss of rank. I guess I must’ve struck a nerve. They’re coming after the whistleblower. Now, I know where the battle lines are drawn; I’m a lifelong socialist in the line of Chomsky, in that lineage. I’m prepared to plant a bug in the chief’s office. I’m prepared to be a dirty trickster. Because these women were innocent! They were girls! And I said to my union rep, I’ll go all the way with this. I want to speak the truth, and if I get fired, I’ll take that. I begged him, ‘Do not muzzle me.’ But he said, ‘Lenny, forget it. These guys are all best friends, and if you take them down, you’re gonna take down a lot of good people with them.’ So I walked into that hearing and didn’t say a word in my own defense.”
“But I don’t get it. What was the hearing for? What did they say you’d done?”
“They had me on a whole trumped-up case of stalking these coeds. All my investigation notes, my log, where my car had been—they took everything and creatively interpreted it to say that I was following them. I was actually impressed at their creativity. They must have taken a lot of time building this trumped-up case against me instead of keeping the people of Cambridge safe.”
Corey had assured Leonard he completely appreciated that a given thing could look two utterly different ways depending on how you looked at it. At the time, he had taken Leonard’s story at face value, as evidence of his colorful life and embattled individualism, and as an eye-opening account of how the world really worked—of how contemptibly misguided and narrow-minded even supposedly good people could be.
But now, he wondered why did Leonard have two different sets of uniform trousers?
* * *
—
Corey took his troubles to his friend.
“Just a week ago he was a great scientist. What could happen in one week that would make you turn against him? Think hard.” Adrian leaned forward, frowning, wearing glasses. “What are you really worried about?” He pressed the first two fingers of his hand against his lower lip and prepared to listen. “Try and be specific.” Adrian knew how to ask these questions. He’d been seeing a psychiatrist for years.
“I don’t trust him,” Corey said.
Adrian tapped his lower lip, said “Hm,” and betrayed the hint of a smile. “That’s interesting.”
“How so?”
“You’re paranoid.”
“Really?”
Adrian smiled openly. “I’m paranoid too.” He spread his legs and rapped his crotch. “Why do you think I w
ear a cup all the time?”
“I didn’t know you wore it all the time.”
“Oh but I do.” Adrian said he wore it all the time—not just during wrestling practice, but after practice when his cup was reeking and all day long without washing, and not just during wrestling season either, but year-round. Adrian admitted that it made him stink, but far from minding it, he delighted in it; he was proud of smelling bad.
“But why do you do that?”
“I’m afraid of getting castrated.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“It’s related to my mother. Freud describes it.” Adrian touched the Freud on his desk, a thick chunk of a book that brought together the thinker’s major writings—a portable edition like the Nietzsche, which he had finished.
“Can you explain it?”
“It’s simple really. Let’s say a boy has a certain amount of self-esteem, but it makes his mother jealous. She has penis envy. She wants those feelings of love and esteem for herself.”
* * *
—
Even if he couldn’t explain it to the satisfaction of his psychoanalytically inclined friend, by the end of January, Corey felt he had gone full circle: from not knowing his father, to thinking he knew him a little, and back to not knowing him at all.
The energy of their relationship changed, but it didn’t dissolve right away. Corey still had an appetite for Leonard’s stories. Then one sunny day, Leonard gave him a drug without warning, something that wasn’t pot. He gave him what appeared to be a joint from his cop bag. Corey lit the joint and the smoke tasted bitter, almost like burning plastic, right away; not like an herb, but like something you shouldn’t put inside you.
“Do you want a hit?” he asked his father.
“No, that’s for you.”
Everything else in the room—the splintered wooden flooring lit by the sun, the battered coffee table, the dust on the books, the beige futon, the woven wall hanging of Buddha Gautama floating joyfully in the center of a flower, Leonard’s cheap black trousers, his undershirt and the gray-white meat of his large bare arms, his Jesuit face in spectacles—all was opaque and no light passed through it; it all absorbed the sun, thought Corey. He realized that he didn’t feel normal.
“Pot is the drug of the counterculture,” Leonard said. “You know who turned me on to pot? I had a girlfriend who used Jamaican marijuana as an aphrodisiac. She’d feel like making love for hours. To please a woman, you stay inside her. You can’t go slow enough. You enter her and very gently start to move. You don’t go in and out. You stay in and move in a circle. Most men have no idea what they’re doing. She taught me all that. Do you know who she was?”
“I feel sick in the head,” Corey said.
“Go get yourself a glass of water.” Leonard took the joint out of his hand, extinguished it on the table, swept up the ashes, and put it in a plastic bag.
* * *
—
That night, Corey dreamed that he was driving through the desert with his mother. They rode in a beat-up white car with dirt ground into the paint, as if they had been driving for days. They were living in the car and the metallic strip along the door had been broken off. He didn’t know why they were in the desert. For some reason, he knew it had to do with San Francisco.
The sky was radiant. There was an ache behind his eyes. Something was tightening protectively inside his head to stop him from seeing so much sunlight all at once.
His blonde-haired mother was showing him the giant saguaro cactus. She wore sunglasses, and he could see the giant cactus in her eyes like the figure of a man.
Saguaro, he knew, meant “palm of saint.”
Someone else was there, someone he believed to be the man he knew as Leonard. He saw a building that was a trailer or a gas station. The man came out carrying an armload of food cans. The man was putting a bottle of black oil in the car. He thought they must have been at someone’s house, a trailer or a cabin in the woods.
All of them were working, doing some kind of landscaping. To Corey, it was a game of watching out for thorns. The man, whoever he was, was cutting branches using a chainsaw, wearing leather gloves.
They threw down mesquite and bright green creosote boughs that the man had cut, and started a fire, a little quiet flame that began seeping through the branches. The fire caught on and started crackling. When the creosote ignited, the wood made a sound like a blowtorch and a thick unreal-looking curtain of orange flame lifted up ten or twelve feet high.
The fire made him think of a giant genie dancing and flapping an orange rug over his mother.
Corey was fascinated by the churning, bloody-looking fire, licking and billowing. But his mother was upset. She asked Leonard not to burn anything else.
But Leonard wouldn’t listen. He told Corey to help him drag more brush on the fire, and Corey did what he was told, but felt guilty about it.
An American Indian woman wearing a cowboy hat came directly up the road to them and asked, “Do you know what you’re doing? Ten years ago this entire desert burned up from a campfire. All it takes is a little wind and everything here is going to burn, all these people’s houses.”
“You see?” his mother cried. “Don’t you see, Leonard?”
But the man ignored both women and set fire to the rest of the brush.
There was something in the dream that Corey’s mind was hiding from himself, much like the inner mechanism of his eyes shutting out the sun.
11
Scarlatta
A short time later, on the first of February, Gloria was driving to work when she stalled her car opposite a Hess station on Gallivan Boulevard in the middle of morning rush hour. She tried the ignition twice. When she didn’t get lucky, she reached out and turned off “Land of the Glass Pinecones” by Human Sexual Response so she could think. Behind her, cars were forcing their way into the other lane.
Chances were, she reasoned, the problem was in her left leg, the one that worked the clutch. She made a special mental effort and pushed the pedal all the way down to the floor. She tried the key again. The engine started. She took her foot off the clutch. Scarlatta started pulling forward.
A big girl in a bomber jacket zoomed around her in a Jeep Cherokee, yelling, “You stupid fucking retard, learn to fucking drive!”
Sealed inside her car, Gloria shouted, “Don’t yell at me! You have everything!”
She was only fifteen minutes late for work, but her trouble on the road suddenly hit her with its implications, and she got panicked. From her work computer, she looked up how to apply for disability in Massachusetts.
It was complicated and bureaucratic and would take quite a lot of time. They needed her work history for the past fifteen years, her educational background, and a medical release form for every doctor, hospital, therapist involved in her disease. There were ten pages of medical release forms.
She called the social worker, near tears, and said, “This thing is so enormous.”
Dawn Gillespie didn’t seem to share her aversion to paperwork. She spoke about the system as if she were explaining it, but it wasn’t an explanation, it was a burying in fine print. She sounded like human fine print. She knew so many rules it was amazing. The more she talked fine print, the more overwhelmed Gloria felt, but she was afraid to tell Dawn to be quiet because she was the only help she had.
“All I know is it isn’t safe for me to drive. I’m in trouble here. I shouldn’t have waited this long.”
The social worker kept talking forms until Gloria thanked her and, holding her head with her eyes shut, said goodbye and hung up the phone.
* * *
—
The next day, she asked Leonard to help her out by driving her to work. He dropped her off in Fields Corner and took her little red hatchback for the rest of the day, going wherever he went.
That
evening at five o’clock when he was supposed to pick her up, he wasn’t there. Gloria couldn’t reach him on her cell. She called her son and had him try Leonard’s phone, but Corey couldn’t reach him either. She waited for an hour on the ramp outside her job. Finally she went to the nearest bus stop. She took the first bus that came. Then she noticed they were driving through unfamiliar streets. She got up to ask where they were going but was afraid of losing her balance and sat back down. Out the window, she recognized Blue Hill Avenue and, with difficulty, pressed the Stop Request button. As she was getting off, she asked if she could get to the Red Line from here. The driver told her no. It was very cold. A bus was waiting by the park. She hurried towards it, but it pulled away. She hurried to the next one. “Wait!” she called. The driver, a dreadlocked man, waited. After climbing aboard, she clutched the grab bar and asked him how she could get to the Red Line. “You’re a long way off,” he said, but promised to tell her when to disembark.
She took a seat near the front, behind a sign that showed a man in handcuffs. Assaulting the driver was punishable by a $10,000 fine. Except for two fat girls in tight jeans and gold mascara sitting across from Gloria who gave off an air of secret jubilation, the other passengers maintained a strict reserve. The bus swung downhill onto a forested road sparsely dotted with old houses. The driver let her off at an outdoor train platform. She was confused. “Get on the train,” people told her. The train operator, a thin fellow, leaned out of his chair and asked if she was getting on.