by Tao Lin
Though if love was an animal, Garret knew, it would probably be the Loch Ness Monster. If it didn’t exist, that didn’t matter. People made models of it, put it in the water, and took photos. The hoax of it was good enough. The idea of it. Though some people feared it, wished it would just go away, had their lives insured against being eaten alive by it.
Late one night, Kristy got up to use the bathroom.
“What’s this on it,” Garret said. “Kristy, why are you slamming the door?” He had just had a dream where he walked to a deli and ordered a bagel with cream cheese, but instead received a bagel with something else on it; he couldn’t tell what—and then the sound of a door closing.
“I had to use the bathroom,” Kristy said.
“Please don’t slam the door,” Garret said. “Be more considerate.” He shifted his head. His hair against the pillow made a loud, prolonged noise—a noise that, before it stopped, seemed as if it might go on forever.
They rarely made love anymore, and only in the mornings, when one of them would wake up, knead against the other, and then start grabbing in that direction. Their heads would be floury and egg-beaten, operating on a kind of toasted, bakery lust, and they’d have sex like that—faces turned away, mouths closed and puffy and hard, eyes scrunched shut.
Afterwards, Garret would feel masturbatory and boneless.
He attended another anti-war meeting. There was another war that was going to happen soon. People stood up and said things. One person said, “People are going to seek happiness. People need to understand that other people are going to do what they think will make them happiest. So people need to just back off, let this happen.” She had a ring in her nose, like a bull. The ring was a pale piece of bone. “Revolution is from the inside out,” she said. “It’s over,” someone else said, “the world is done for, doomed—and I say oh well, oh, well,” then stood and walked briskly out of the room, jumping to slap the top of the doorway on the way out. There was a long moment of nothing, and then a heavy-set, kind-faced man sitting adjacent Garret said loudly, at the ground, “Fuck war, fuck, war.” People gathered around and patted his back. Some of them, confused and tired, or else just lazy, patted Garret’s back, patted anyone’s back. There were, again, sign up sheets against the wall. Garret signed up for three different things. He walked out into the city. Drunk people were moving slantly across the sidewalks and streets, though it was only Wednesday.
Garret thought that he might go back to Florida. Maybe get a job on a golf course. He once had a friend who drove one of those armored carts around, vacuuming up golf balls on golf ranges. Maybe he’d do that.
“Come home,” Garret’s mother said on the phone. “You can take a semester off. Kristy can too. Both of you can come live here and be safe.” She said that the terrorists were planning to take hostage the entire island of Manhattan. She had heard on talk radio. They were going to attach outboard motors to Manhattan and drive it like a barge into the Atlantic Ocean. No one knew what the terrorists would do after that, though. Maybe have a cruise around the world, a caller said. Low-key, with virgin pina coladas. Maybe start their own country, another caller said, to legitimize and their terrorism, make it humanitarian and moral and—
He was cut off there.
Kristy had an appointment made to remove her wisdom teeth. She asked Garret to accompany her, but Garret said he had a class that morning. He would meet her after, though.
Kristy’s face became lumpy and hard after the operation. “I feel like a monster,” she said. They went into an ice cream store, and she began to weep. Garret thought about getting up to hug her, but then just put a hand on her head, across the table. “You look fine,” he said. “It won’t last, anyway.”
Kristy went to her sister’s place and Garret went back to Brooklyn.
They didn’t talk for a week. Then Garret called her. She said she hadn’t called because her face was swollen. She didn’t want Garret to see. Garret said he didn’t care. They agreed to meet for a movie that night at nine. She said that things would change from now on. She wouldn’t be late anymore. They’d go ice-skating.
She came running up for the movie at 8:59. Her face was red and blue on one side; it looked a little bludgeoned, or else diseased.
Garret had the tickets ready and they went in. They watched the trailers and then Kristy reached onto Garret’s lap and held his hand. Garret leaned over and whispered, “Come outside a minute, I have to tell you something.”
Outside, Kristy smiled at him, and then Garret wasn’t sure, but he said it anyway: “If a terrorist said to you that if you were late he’d kill you and your family, would you be one minute early? You wouldn’t; you’d be half the fucking day early.” He had rehearsed in his head.
“What the hell are you saying, Garret?” said Kristy. “Are you kidding me? Don’t do this. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But there were things that you had to worry about, Garret knew, that you had to care about. If he didn’t say anything, then she would be 20 minutes late, then an hour, then she wouldn’t show up at all. Or she’d show up and throw a pie in his face. You had to keep your life under control. Preempt it. You had to let it know that you were not happy. Though maybe you didn’t. Maybe it was that you should let things go, be tolerant and easy-going and not ever worry. Ease yourself towards acceptance and quietude, towards, what though—death? No; that didn’t seem right. You were supposed to resist death.
“Yeah I do,” Garret said. “I’m talking about you shouldn’t be late all the time. It’s inconsiderate.”
“Will you realize what you’re saying right now? I was early this time.”
“I know, but you ran here,” Garret said. “You could have easily been late.”
“So what? I was early.”
They stood there for a long time. All the moody emptinesses inside of them swelled and joined, and then ensconced them, like bubbles, and there, inside, they floated—the qualmish, smoked-out bodies of them, stale and still and upside-down. People around them drifted in and out of cars, into stores, across streets and over sidewalks.
“You should have been twenty minutes early,” Garret finally said. “You should have thought, ‘Hmm, I’ve been late so many times, maybe I should come much earlier this time, in case one of my excuses comes up to delay me.’ ”
“You should have been an hour early,”—once he started, he knew, he had to keep going; the anger came from nowhere, it came and was here—“sitting and waiting, to make up for all the hundreds of hours you’ve been late before, to compensate, to make sure.” The city lights overlapped in the air, became swimmy, blotchy, and brown. What was reasonable and what was required and what was just plain stupid? Should he apologize? All of life seemed just to be one thing—one slap-dash’ed, stuffed turkey of a thing, flying out of the oven and into the night, into orbit; something once familiar and under control, but now just out there, unknown, by itself, charred and brainless and rarely glimpsed.
“That’s it,” Kristy said. “I’m going to your place right now to get my stuff.”
They went back to Garret’s apartment. They walked the entire way. Across the avenues and over the Brooklyn bridge. She walked about 20 feet in front. He followed. The night was noisy and black, starless and warm. Maybe it was not winter at all, but summer.
At his apartment, Garret sat on his bed.
Kristy smashed her possessions into her piece of luggage. “You can keep these for your next girlfriend.” She held up two mud-green three-pound weights.
“Can you be quiet a little? My suitemate is probably trying to sleep,” Garret said. “Why are you so angry, anyway? You’re leaving me, so calm down.”
Kristy’s mouth began to bleed, a slow seeping at the edge, like an early sign of mutation. Her cheek had been swollen for too long. There was maybe something wrong with the stitches. “Fuck,” she said. “You didn’t even come with me for my wisdom teeth.” She wiped her mouth with one of Garret’s shirts.
“You had to go to class?—you skip all your fucking classes!”
“That’s my shirt,” Garret said. “That’s inconsiderate.” Against the bureau was a stack of photos that they had taken together. “Take your photos,” Garret said. Kristy kicked them across the floor. She threw her sandals against the wall. They lodged in the window blinds and dust went in the air.
“Why are you acting like this?” Garret said.
Kristy set her luggage upright, the wheels aimed at the door. “Why don’t you install soundproof walls for your suitemate?” she said. “If you care about him so much, why don’t you?”
“I will,” Garret said. “That’s considerate of you, finally.” They looked at each other. Blood oozed again out of Kristy’s mouth, and then out her nose, like a crushed thought. She went and grabbed her sandals from the blinds. She set her luggage outside the door, got in position to properly slam the door with both hands, and then slammed it. The door bounced off its frame without closing.
Kristy wheeled her luggage down the outside hall. It made squeaky noises, and train track noises. Garret sat and listened. For a moment he felt sorry for her, for himself, for the whole wrecked and blighting world—it was hopeless, really—but then he felt okay, felt that things were not that bad; he felt friendly, and he felt that this moment of softness, of calm, though maybe it was just that he was tired, was good, was enough, that if there could be this feeling, then things would go on, month after month, one good and tiny feeling per; it was okay. And he wanted suddenly, badly, to share all this, and so he called out, “Have a good week.” He stood and shouted, “Wait; I hope you can be happy now; I hope we can be friends still, really,” and then Kristy was back, was looking, was saying, “You’re a real shithead,” was saying some other things, her face inflamed, and the door, then, slamming shut, making a loud noise.
Three-Day Cruise
After they euthanatize the poodle, they go on the Bahamas cruise. After that, the dad dies of a brain tumor that no one knew about. The mom, then, at Cocoa Beach, teaching herself to swim, drowns; and the son, Paul, too, dies, when he one night sees a car crash happening, is looking, passing by, but then has a dull thought—some sudden vapid mood that almost puts him to sleep—yawns, and swerves, in an abstractly wanting and participatory way, toward the crash. He accelerates, misses, and drives into a pole.
The daughter, Mattie, goes on living. She sometimes shuts her eyes, tight, and then opens them again, placing herself in next week’s Sunday. It’s a kind of time travel. Something make believe, for kids. Though of course, Mattie knows, she is not a kid. She is in her thirties, in Florida, where she grew up. She has returned. She sometimes feels as if there is a quick-person, five minutes ahead of her, living her life before she gets there. There is one week in all the others when she joins a gym, buys expensive facial creams, and sits sipping broth in the food courts of shopping malls. It is not a bad week. She remembers that week. Then she doesn’t remember it. She remembers nothing. All her memories go to noise, go satirical and loud and uncontrollable—they fly like teeth and balloons from her brain to the open bones of her eyes, and clang there, lodge and impact and burst there. The months accumulate like houses in the middle of nowhere. And her sense of irony, finally, her cheap way of paradox, of that self-blanking kind of truth and calm, of easing, sometimes, into the sarcastic haze of living—it goes bad, like an awful, leaden, jam-packed something in her head. Mattie is eating a sandwich. She is scribbling poems on envelopes. She is distracted, she is old. She is dead from something that makes her forget what it is before it kills her.
Mattie is twelve. She feels, today, for the first time, that happiness is something behind her, something mousy and slick and sliding away, into some hole, into some hole of that some hole.
“Do you ever feel sad?” says Mattie. She and Paul are at the supermarket. She is looking at a blow-dryer box, the woman on which has her hair in such a way that she must, Mattie thinks, be flying.
“What’s happier,” says Paul. He is six. “The most happy rabbit in the world? A man that is normal happy? A cookie? Between one and a hundred how happy is a cookie? A green one.” They are at the supermarket for AAA batteries.
“Forty,” says Mattie. “Wait. A green one?” She’s looking at the blow-dryer box. “I can’t see out my right eye,” she says. “It’s blurry. Oh, now I can.”
“Oh,” says Paul. He giggles. “What kind of batteries won’t rip you off? This one has Michael Jordan on it. Michael Jordan is funny.”
“This lady is flying. This is … unacceptable,” says Mattie. She’s thinking about dirt—dirt on the ground, in hair, dirt in the sky. She had a dream about dirt. “I hate … school.”
“Why?” says Paul. He looks stricken for a moment, a little horrified.
“I’m twelve,” says Mattie. “I’m twelve years old!”
“Michael Jordan is strange,” says Paul.
They buy Energizer batteries. The parking lot gleams from all the cars. They cross the street, into their neighborhood. Some older kids are gliding around on rollerblades, playing street hockey. One little girl has a baseball bat and is chasing a few of the others. It is sunny and October and breezy. “The air tickles,” says Paul. He has Michael Jordan in his head, and can’t stop giggling. He blocks the wind from his neck with strangling motions and says, “My hands tickle!” In front of their house, he cartwheels onto grass. He runs at Mattie and jump kicks the air in front of her. Mattie pats his head. Paul goes and hops, circuitously, over a red flower plant. He looks at Mattie and then runs into the house, the front door of which is open.
The mom is in the side yard, watering a palmetto with the hose. Her dress is a bit wet, and her hair too. She waves at Mattie. Their toy poodle is sitting very still on top of the mailbox. He is overheated, but has retained good posture. He looks content in a once-wild way.
Mattie waves at her mom and carries the poodle into the living room.
On the sofa, Mattie pets the poodle until it is dark outside. She lies down. She stares sideways through the sliding glass door, at the sky. In third grade she told some classmates that their teacher, Mrs. Beonard, looked like a dolphin, even though Mrs. Beonard looked very much like an owl. She surprised herself then, and liked it.
Mattie sits up, carries the poodle into her room. She arranges it so they lie facing each other on the bed. The poodle is submissive and inaudible. Mattie closes her eyes, and sees her own face. A nerd, she thinks. Someone at school had called her a nerd. She tries not to think about dirt. Her dream about dirt wasn’t a good dream. She sneezes. Her head rings—resonates, like a padded bell. The poodle stands. Mattie pets him until he is flat again. She keeps her hand on his body. She sneezes again, hard, the hardest sneeze she has ever sneezed, and this time there’s an exquisite, high-pitched squeak from the pappy center of her head, and then she feels perceptually enhanced—honed and lucid as a tiny, soap-washed moon. She closes her eyes. She hears new things. She hears her own shouldery hipbone, low and curving, sounding purly, cello tones. She hears an ant, in the yard, walking up a blade of grass. She falls asleep and wakes up early in the morning, wide-eyed and alert, four hours before school.
The dad goes around one Saturday with a notepad, taking orders for lunch. He goes out, comes back. “Who ordered the toy poodle?” he says. He’s holding, in a manhandled way, an apricot-hued poodle, who is a girl. He points at his notepad. “Says here …”
“I ordered that!” says Paul. He is eight. He is taking all the credit for this, in case of future situations. “I knew to order something good like that.” He looks around. The world, he feels, is becoming less, is closing in, trying to detain him, clamp him like a bug. He takes the apricot poodle and runs away.
The mom is going around the house, watering her many potted plants.
Mattie comes out from her room, gets the other poodle, goes back to her room.
In bed, the dad says, “It’s fair.” He’s thinking about the poodles. It’s a few years later
. “One poodle per child. One male, one female.”
“Yes,” says the mom. “Fair.” She has discovered, going through the trash, envelopes postmarked Nevada, from someone named Scarlet Leysen. The dad had taken a business trip there. Two females per male, the mom thinks. “Life isn’t fair,” she says. “So we should comport extra fair, to compensate.” She used to say, “Life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make it fair,” but changed it one day while eating a peach, when she was twenty.
“I know,” says the dad. “I agree.” He goes to pat the mom’s shoulder, but pats the bed instead. He moves his hand through the dark and pats it down again, on the mom’s face. Her lips and teeth are wet; she has just licked them. “Sorry,” says the dad. He gets up, washes his hands, goes out into the rest of the house.
The mom dreams of the dad, dreams that he descends through a trapdoor, into a room that spins. He crouches, leaps, pushes a button on a wall. A rope ladder appears. He catches it, helicopter-style, climbs it, and is back in the bedroom. He lies down. He rolls over, toward her. His head is snoring and fat and looming, and she is afraid. She wakes up and there he is. His head is snoring, but not fat or looming; he is smiling a little.
In the morning, the mom goes looking for the envelopes. She doesn’t find any. She sits down with a microwaved waffle, a bowl of dried cranberries, a canister of whipped cream. She plays back the dream in her head. She likes the rope ladder part. She holds the whipped cream vertically down, as it says to on the canister.