by Brock Clarke
“There’s a seafood processor in Sheboygan, Wisconsin?”
“Lake and river fish processor,” she explained. “Seafood’s just a catchall. And here they come.” On the laptop many riders with long spears crested a hill, surveying the enemy below and shaking their long spears, celebrating in advance. Caroline and I were lying side by side, back down in bed. I was naked except for my new unbuttoned shiny blue German shirt, Caroline except for her ballet slippers.
124.
An hour later, when the movie was over, Caroline closed her laptop, looked at me squarely, and said, “We had some good sex.” Which is more than Dawn, or John Calvin, or my mother in her famous book, ever said on the subject.
125.
The sentence “We had some good sex” will make you gabby. I immediately told Caroline about my job, and my parents and their deaths, and my aunt’s appearance, and our trip, and the places we’d been and the people we’d met and the things we’d done, which included stealing the knife. I worried about this last—worried that Caroline would think less of my aunt and, by association, less of me—but it didn’t seem to bother her, or even surprise her much. She nodded and listened and sipped from a plastic cup of red wine (this was another thing she and my aunt seemed to have in common: there always seemed to be alcohol around, and she always seemed to be drinking it, and it didn’t seem to affect her much), and when I was done telling her my story, she drained her cup, put it on the bedside table, and then asked, “Why do you keep saying ‘my mother’s famous book’?”
“Because it is,” I said, and I was surprised to hear how defensive I sounded.
Caroline shrugged and said, “Well, I’ve never heard of it.” And then she turned off the lights, and we went to sleep.
Eleven
126.
When I woke up it was seven in the morning. It was the morning of my third day in Europe. I rolled over to kiss Caroline good morning, but she wasn’t there. She’d left a note saying she had to make some work calls and didn’t want to wake me and that she’d see me later! That was her exclamation point, and it made me glad. I went back to my own room, feeling triumphant. After having sex with Dawn, I’d always felt unworthy: not unworthy of Dawn but unworthy of the act that so many people who were not John Calvin and my mother had thought and written and talked so much about. But now, I felt different. I had had sex and it was good, and now I wanted to tell someone about it.
127.
It Was Good
Dear readers, I don’t know if you’ve ever made love on a train, but I highly recommend it. A train doesn’t move so much as it chugs, sort of bucks, but smoothly, as it proceeds toward its next station.
128.
And then I stopped. Because I was thinking of my mother—not only what she would think about the subject but also how it was written. I’d eavesdropped on many of her conversations with her acolytes, had heard her make a case against the elaborate metaphor, especially when writing about God. “One does not do justice to God,” she wrote in her famous book, “by turning him into a metaphor.” I don’t know if that’s true about God, but I thought it might be true about sex and trains. In any case, I decided to start again.
129.
It Was Good
Dear readers, there is no pellet stove in this blog post. There is just one hard cock and one wet pussy and . . .
130.
And then I stopped again. Not because of John Calvin or my mother but because I pictured the people who at that moment I cared about the most. Which is to say, I pictured my aunt and now Caroline and then thought of them reading the post, and suddenly I did not want to finish it or publish it, which is why most professional bloggers spend most of their professional lives trying to avoid having that thought, or picturing those people, or having those people in their lives in the first place
131.
I put my phone in my pocket and went to see my aunt.
She was sitting on her folded-up bed in her room, drinking a cup of coffee. On the floor next to her was a silver tray. On the tray, a silver pot, steam drifting out of the spout, and next to the pot, also on the tray, a white mug identical to my aunt’s except that it was empty. She poured coffee into the mug and handed it to me, and I sat on the couch and we drank in silence. The weather was just as foul outside—low-hanging steely clouds and rain speckling the train windows—but my inner weather had improved. I thought of my aunt and my father, and what they had done, and then of my mother and the Reverend John Lawrence, and what they’d apparently done, and I felt more generous toward them than I had before, which apparently is what good sex will do to you, and I also felt superior to them, which also, apparently, is what good sex will do to you.
“Remember, thou shall never apologize, Calvin,” my aunt finally said, reciting one of her commandments. It occurred to me that Caroline and I had had sex in the next room over and that it might have been loud, might have kept her up. Was she talking about that? Or was she talking about the previous night, when I’d said what I’d said about love and delusion, and she’d said that I was stupid?
“Apologize for what?” I said, and my aunt said, “Exactly.” And then she said, “Caroline,” and when she said Caroline’s name, my penis throbbed as a reminder. But one of the things that it reminded me of was how my penis throbbed when I’d had kidney stones. And how easily it is that good things are ruined by the bad things they so closely resemble.
“I had sex with her, and she said it was good,” I said before I could stop myself. And just saying that felt like an accomplishment, like another step away from who I’d been and toward who I wanted to be. Although the news didn’t seem to surprise my aunt at all. “Good for you,” she said, sipping from her cup. “I like Caroline. Even though she’s Interpol.”
I didn’t respond to this. I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t know what it meant to be Interpol, or what Interpol even was. Just as I hadn’t wanted to admit to Caroline the night before that I had never watched The Lord of the Rings or read the books the movies were made from. When you are made to read John Calvin as a child, you aren’t exactly encouraged to read or watch or learn the things that other people are reading or watching or learning as children instead of reading John Calvin. And then, when I was an adult, and was supposedly free to do what I want and had access to the technology that would supposedly allow me to catch up on all the things I’d missed, there was too much, much too much, and I would always be behind, and so I decided to write about pellet stoves and selectively quote the John Calvin I had read as a child and selectively quote from the famous book that my mother had written about reading and making me read John Calvin, and that was it.
“Interpol,” Aunt Beatrice said. “The international police. Although more of a spy agency than law enforcement proper.”
I thought that was ridiculous and I said so. In response, my aunt said, “Doesn’t Caroline remind you of someone.” It wasn’t a question. Which meant she thought I should know the answer. I thought about it, but no, Caroline hadn’t reminded me of anyone. “Not even,” my aunt said, “that lovely young ice maiden you spoke to in Stockholm.”
I knew now Aunt Beatrice was talking about the tall, pale woman from the Swedish pellet stove company who accosted me in the hotel lobby and told me that unfunny jokes were lies. This was even more ridiculous: she and Caroline had looked nothing alike. She’d had blonde hair, and Caroline’s was gray; she’d had blue eyes, and Caroline’s were brown; she’d worn glasses, and Caroline did not. Plus, I pointed out, that woman worked for Lingonnaire, the pellet stove manufacturer, whereas Caroline was a seafood processor. When I said that Caroline was a seafood processor, it sounded only slightly less ridiculous than my aunt saying that she was a pellet stove manufacturer in addition to being a policewoman who was also spy. Still, I persisted. “Caroline’s from Sheboygan, Wisconsin,” I said.
“That’s how I know she’s Interpol,” my aunt said. “If she were really from Wisconsin, she’d be from Racine.”
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I had no idea what this was supposed to mean, but before I could pursue it further the train came a stop. I looked outside the window and saw that we’d pulled into the Paris station. Sometime during the night, we’d crossed into France, and I’d not realized it. I felt an odd sense of accomplishment. I know now that it’s the sense of accomplishment a traveler feels when he’s entered a new country. I did it! a traveler feels, even though the traveler hasn’t done anything. I looked back to my aunt, to see if she was feeling what I was feeling. She wasn’t in the room anymore. “Calvin,” she said from the hallway, and I followed her voice, and then her, and moments later we were off the train and in Paris.
132.
Two weeks before there had been a terrorist attack in Paris, and in fact the train station itself had been bombed, and several platforms were still closed, and there was still a whiff of cordite in the air, although that was probably just my imagination, since I’d never, to my knowledge, actually smelled cordite. There were police everywhere in the station, and they were all holding guns, huge black automatic rifles slung over their shoulders and across their chests, where everyone could see them. The police and their guns made me nervous—after all, who knew what kind of stolen things my aunt had in her purse or on her person—and so I kept my head down as we walked through the station until my aunt stopped, elbowed me, and gestured with her head toward a high table near one of the kiosks in the station. There on the table was a cell phone, and next to that was a machine gun with the muzzle pointed toward me. A black policewoman was sitting at the table. She was wearing a balaclava, not over her face (which was why I could see that she was black) but instead pulled down beneath her chin, bunched up like a turtleneck, and she was holding, and in fact was smiling at, but had not yet begun to eat or lick, the most enormous ice cream cone I have ever seen.
133.
From the train station we took a subway, and after several minutes we got off the subway. When we exited the station, I’d had hopes of seeing Paris, the Paris one always hears that one should see. But I saw no Eiffel Tower, no Louvre, no Orsay, no Montmarte, no arrondissements of note. Instead, we walked past many unbeautiful buildings. Gray-and-black concrete and dirty tinted glass, and brutal angles and graffiti everywhere. Most of the graffiti lacked brightness and was simply a different drab color than the drab-colored building it happened to be painted on.
I mentioned to my aunt my disappointment, and she said, “I’ve never liked Paris.” I thought she was talking about the Paris we were walking through, but no. “I don’t like great cities,” she said. “Or great countries.”
When she said that, I thought of my mother. One of the things that had made her famous book so popular was that it had an odd nationalist bent. In her book, she’d argued that America, for all its faults, was the best country in the world. It was also, she argued, the most Calvinist country. Which was what, I suppose, made it the best. “Like John Calvin,” my mother wrote in her famous book, “the people of the United States have been much concerned with the rule of law, and there is much evidence in the counter-experiences of other countries to suggest he, and we, have been right to be thus concerned.”
But I didn’t say this to my aunt. Instead, I said, “America is number one.” This had been the campaign slogan of the man who would eventually become our president. Charles Otis, my old classmate and neighbor, was one of his supporters and had taken to wearing a red mesh baseball hat with that slogan on its face, although on Charles’s hat the symbol was on the wrong side of the number: AMERICA IS 1#.
My aunt repeated the slogan and said, “It’s true. That’s why I don’t like it.”
“But you lived in Ohio,” I pointed out.
“For thirty-six years,” my aunt. “Ending five days ago.” Which meant that she’d lived in Ohio right up until she’d come to her sister’s funeral. Which meant she’d lived in the same time zone as me for most of my life and had not even bothered to see me or contact me. Why? That’s what I wanted to ask, and in fact that’s what I did ask, but Aunt Beatrice misunderstood the question.
“No one thinks Ohio is great,” my aunt said. “Not even Ohioans. That’s why I wanted to live there.”
134.
“You seem very aware of dark people, Calvin,” my aunt said as we walked. It was true there were dark people everywhere. Darker people who I assumed were from Africa. Somewhat darker lighter people who I assumed were from the Middle East or from northern Africa. These people were wearing clothes, of course, and I’m sure they were of different height and weight and so on. But basically I noticed how many of them there were and that their skin color was different from mine. My aunt was right that I was aware of them. The police—who, like the policewoman in the station, had their balaclavas bunched around their necks, but who, unlike the policewoman in the station, all seemed to be white—seemed equally aware of them. Every time they passed a dark person or a dark person passed them, the gendarmes’ hands went to their guns and pushed them out from their chests, as though inviting the dark people to show them their guns, too.
“No,” I said. Because this is how white Americans, even, or especially, white Americans in a very white place like Congress, are taught to talk about race: to deny that they are aware of it. In fact, our future president had been elected because he said he was not aware of it. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Because this is the other way white Americans are taught to talk about race: to admit that yes, they are aware of it and that they’re sorry. And in fact this was another reason our future president had been elected: because, unlike those white people he thought were weak for saying they were sorry, he refused to say he was sorry, or that he was even aware that there were reasons for him to be sorry, let alone for him to say he was sorry, which, sorry, he was not going to do. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Don’t be,” my aunt said loudly, cheerfully. “They’re aware of you, too.”
135.
The weather started to clear, the sun peeking out from behind the clouds. I rolled up the sleeves of my shiny new German shirt and could feel sweat beading around my hair buds.
“Most of the dark people I know are criminals,” my aunt said in her same loud, cheerful voice, and several dark people looked in her direction, and several police did, too, and I wondered if they were just responding to the tone and volume of her voice or whether they understood English. I really hoped they didn’t speak English. Aunt Beatrice had told Caroline the day before about the time she’d been shot and hoped the bullet wouldn’t hit her femoral artery, wherever or whatever that was. It wasn’t hard to imagine why someone would shoot her.
“I’m guessing that most of the white people you know are criminals, too,” I pointed out.
My aunt nodded and said, “When your mother and I were sixteen years old, we stole a safe.”
“What?” I said, but it was as though I’d said, Whose?
“It was our father’s,” Aunt Beatrice said. “Or at least his church’s. It was where he kept the offerings, the tithes, the rainy-day funds, the church improvement funds. Your mother and I didn’t need the money. We just wanted to see if we could steal it. I say ‘we,’ but of course it was my idea. Nola just tagged along reluctantly. The safe was very heavy. The two of us managed to drag it out of the church in the middle of the night. There, I thought, we’d stolen it. Or at least moved it. And after that, we wanted to see if we could open it. We rolled it down the hill. Square things roll wrong, Calvin. The safe left large punctures and dents in the hill, and all the way down I could heard the change inside the safe rattling and clanging. The safe came to rest at the bottom of the hill, near the train tracks. We ran to see if we’d done it, but we hadn’t done it: the safe was still unopened. I didn’t know what to do. I was ready to give up. But your mother had lost her reluctance. The sight of that rolling safe had inspired her. She had an idea. She heard the train coming and suggested we roll the safe onto the tracks. I suppose your mother thought the train would crac
k it open and then pass over the wreckage. But no, the safe lodged under the train and stayed lodged. We could see it throw sparks, could hear its terrible scrapes and cries as the train headed toward Quebec. I say ‘terrible.’ But your mother didn’t think it was terrible. She laughed when she realized what had happened and then ran to catch up with the train. I don’t think she wanted to be there when the safe opened, and as far as either of us knew, it never did open. No, she just liked the sparks, the noise. She ran after the train, managed to jump onto the steps that lead to the caboose, and holding on to the railing with one hand, she waved to me with the other, looking just like—”
“A conductor,” I said. Because I knew why my aunt was telling me this story: my mother’s nickname was the Conductor, and the Reverend John Lawrence knew it; and her nickname, and the fact that she’d supposedly been killed by a train, and the fact that we were traveling by train were his proof that she was still alive.
136.
The Conductor. For days and days afterward, I thought about my aunt’s story about my mother and the safe and the train and her nickname. I wished my mother had told me that story when I was a child, or even when I was an adult. Because I would have loved her if I’d known that in addition to her being my mother and the author of a famous book on John Calvin, she was also the Conductor. But maybe she felt that she couldn’t tell me the story and still be the kind of mother that, it turns out, I didn’t want her to be.