Another quick sniff and I found myself climbing a ladder behind J, the metal creaking against his house as we made our way to the roof, and when I got there it was as if I had never seen the sky before. More light than dark, I thought maybe dawn was about to break so I looked to the east but J grunted and I turned to find him pointing at three green wisps, hundreds of miles long, glimmering, cracking like slow whips in the sky.
“Is this really happening?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
Late that night, the wall in my room rippled in the same way, just like the barely visible twinkles on the ceiling of the cave on the St. Croix. The red light outside threw color through the window in rhythm with my heart, carrying me into the darkest part of the night, and then upon the lightening of the morning the colors blended into images of men and women passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials. Some of them talking and some of them not. I felt for a moment that I was a prisoner of these people until I began to name them. With that act, I became their leader and when they congregated in a colosseum I climbed out of my bed, took to its stage, and spoke. This, I told them just before dawn, is the life.
* * *
The world swayed and my vision narrowed and I stumbled to my desk to hold myself up until my senses returned. I couldn’t tell if I had slept or not, though I had lain in bed with my eyes closed for a time. My body was weak, but I was awake and there was no point in trying to deny it. Down at the Arlington Karen asked me if I wanted the usual but, with my stomach in a tight, empty knot, I told her I’d have only coffee.
“How goes the search?” she asked when she returned with my cup and the coffeepot.
“I got nothing,” I said. “I met some people who knew her but no one knows where she went.”
“It doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “If the police haven’t found her I don’t see how you could.”
“The police?” I asked. “Why would they be looking for her?”
“She’s missing, right? Didn’t you file a missing persons report?”
How had I not thought of that? I thanked Karen, tossed back my coffee, and left a five on the table.
My heart pounded like a bass drum as I walked down Old Main toward the police station, the coffee having kickstarted whatever residue was still lurking in my body from the previous night. My mouth grew dry, my tongue like sandpaper as it flailed around of its own accord. I felt my insides coming apart with each step I took through the morning so fresh that dew still sparkled on the lawns. Smells attacked me as I walked—animal droppings, garbage, exhaust—each of them pulling the liquid contents of my stomach closer to the outside world.
The police station was a relic of times past, a stone cube with a peaked roof and the words COUNTY SHERIFF AND JAIL emblazoned on a sign that hung over the door. It stood alone, across a wide parking lot from the more modern government center, three stories of steel and glass housing the courts, jail cells, and probation services. A bell rang when I pushed through the door and a woman with a mop of curly dark hair stood up to meet me.
“My,” she said, “are you feeling okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I could use some water,” I said, my voice a squawk from lack of saliva.
The woman pointed me to a seat and then turned to get me a cup of water from the cooler behind her desk. Beyond her, inside an old jail cell from which the barred door had been removed, a man in uniform was reclining in a chair with his feet up on his desk, eyes closed. The woman whispered something to the sleeping man and he startled, sat up, and shuffled through the papers on his desk before he stood, took the water from the woman, and walked my way. He was a tall and thin man with a bushy blond goatee and blue eyes that stared right through you. The name tag pinned to his chest read SHERIFF BRAUN.
“You’re new in town, aren’t you?” he asked, handing me the cup, which I took and drank to the bottom before responding. I could feel the moisture as it hit my stomach, then the battle as it attacked the dryness of my body, radiating out from my center until it reached its limit. I was far from feeling better and it began to affect my mood.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” I snapped.
“Nothing,” he said. “But this town has very few pedestrians. Hard not to notice when a new one arrives. Did I see you walking with Jennifer Freya the other day?”
“Jenny? Yeah. We’re friends.”
“That’s nice. She and I go way back. Lord knows, she needs some good friends. Anyways, what can we do for you?”
“My mother,” I said. “She’s missing.”
“A missing person. I see. Is that why you look so upset? It’s like you haven’t slept for a week. Claire, bring me a missing persons form!”
His assistant brought the form and we went over all the details. Height and weight, hair color, birthday, but we stumbled when he asked me when I saw her last.
“I think it was 1988,” I said.
“What?”
“Nineteen eighty-eight.”
“That was nine years ago.”
“But she moved away from here less than two years ago.”
The sheriff grew flustered but I couldn’t understand why.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She may be gone but she is not missing. She’s an adult and can do what she pleases. Unless you can prove that she was abducted or had some crime committed against her or she has some sort of mental illness that would cause her to wander off, but it seems to me that none of those conditions are true.”
“But,” I said, “she’s gone. What am I supposed to do?”
“You shouldn’t get your hopes up,” he said. As he spoke of filing paperwork and running her name through the database, a subtle rage built inside me. My muscles tensed and my stomach contracted as I tried to contain my anger at my mother for leaving, at the sheriff for his inability to help, and at myself for caring so much. I could have taken that hundred dollars and done anything else but here I was, chasing down someone who didn’t want to be found. Tears welled up in my eyes, though from where my body took the moisture I’m not sure. The sheriff went on talking as I made my decision to give up on finding my mother and, with the release of this tension, I leaned forward and vomited coffee and water all over the floor.
I apologized and asked if I could clean up, but Claire wouldn’t have it. She told me I needed to go home and get some rest and that’s what I did. I was back in bed by noon and didn’t wake up until the next day.
* * *
J’s house was unlocked, so I stepped in and shut the door. It was dark. I flipped a switch but there was no light. Upstairs, two doorways were curtained off with bedsheets, at the end of the hall a bathroom, also newly doorless. My face in the mirror. I wondered aloud where the doors had gone.
“Who cares about doors, Lucky,” J called from his room. “Where’s my fucking Nintendo?”
Behind the curtain I found J sitting naked on the edge of his bed, tracing the tattoos on his arm with his fingertip. An outline of an eagle and below that, in an uneven hand, the word Dad. He had grown thinner since the day I met him at the fairgrounds but he looked good, so lean that the muscles on his stomach and arms stood out in high definition, his face all sharp angles and cheekbones. Next to him, under a thin blanket, Mary slept.
“If you don’t have it, you better have some other way to make yourself useful.”
He had been telling me that he wanted to trade me something for my game system since he found out I had one, but I kept forgetting to bring it. To make it up to him I found the rolling tray, emptied my pockets onto it, and went to work with the last of my weed in the chair near the window, trying to stop my casual glances over at him. Outside, Sisyphus and Lucifer stood like statues. J rose from the bed and dressed in clothes that he found on the floor. Mary woke and asked J to get her a shirt, then took it under the blanket.
“Why so self-conscious, babe? It’s onl
y Shane and he’s asexual. He slept right next to Jenny and didn’t even try to fuck her.”
“I can’t do this now,” she said, “I have to go to work.” She threw the blanket aside, stood up, left the room.
A few minutes later, we found her downstairs in the kitchen, dressed in her work uniform, trying to tune to a station on the television. J pulled a string that hung from the ceiling. The fixture clicked but nothing happened. He opened the refrigerator, no light in there either, took three cans, and passed them out.
“If that fiend is going to keep stealing the lightbulbs,” J said, “we’re going to drink his pop.”
Mary slapped the top of the television.
“Half the antenna is missing,” she said. “What the hell do you do with half a TV antenna?”
J cracked open his can, then walked past me and Mary, went outside to see the dogs. Mary switched off the television and we followed him. Lucy and Sissy whined and barked like little puppies when they saw J, standing on their hind legs to paw at his belly and lick his face. He grabbed their ears and patted their heads and crouched down to kiss them back.
After we dropped Mary at Taco John’s, J took the wheel, I climbed into the passenger seat, and we drove back to the house to pick up Sissy and Lucy. The dogs weren’t allowed in the car because they left thick black hair all over and they took turns chewing the corners of the front seats. The upholstery was shredded and most of the underlying foam was missing, but when Mary brought up these examples J merely denied that this was proof that his dogs had been in the car.
“Mary missed her period,” J said once we were heading south on the highway, then turned up the radio to sing along with the band, shouting the reasons why he took so many pills. Outside my window, sod farms rolled by. Wide green fields split by thin patches of leafy trees and bushes, other people’s grass before it was cut into squares, made into lawns. A single telephone line rose and fell along the road. I lit the joint I had rolled back in J’s room and passed it to him. J sang on: Everything, everything, everything, everything.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, knowing full well Mary wasn’t the type to get an abortion.
“It’s still too early to tell, too early to even take a pregnancy test, she said, but if there’s really a baby in there she’s going to keep it.”
She, he said, not we.
“Are you happy?”
“These things happen,” he said. “I’ll deal.”
He slumped in the driver’s seat, defeated, suddenly not the person I thought I had known, and I was reminded of a picture of my father and my uncle from when my father was a senior in high school. My father, dressed head to toe in denim for some reason, stood next to my uncle, who carried on his shoulders his daughter, my cousin who was taken away from him before I was born. The confident smile on my father’s face in that photo had been something foreign to me when I first saw it, as well as the golden curls that framed his eyes. This is not to say I had never seen my father smile, we had happy times too, but these were only brief respites from his greater burden, the weight of the world, my weight on his back. This had now found J, the gravity of adult life, the consequences of his wild youth.
J turned off the highway, stopped at a Pump ’N Munch, and asked me if I had any money for drugs. I took two fifties out of my pocket, most of my paycheck from the Aurora, and handed them over. When J got out to pump fuel, the dogs shifted in their seats and watched him through the back window. He went in to pay and came out with a small bag. A pack of cigarettes for me, another for himself. He unwrapped a piece of beef jerky, broke it in two, and threw one of the pieces over his shoulder. The dogs fought over it and after Lucy won, J put the other half in Sissy’s mouth.
“I do know one thing,” J said when we were back on the road. “The next eight months will be my last chance at a real life.”
“Then?”
“The little guy comes.”
We rode without speaking for a while. I reached back to pet the dogs. Sissy had fallen asleep and Lucy was quietly chewing on my seat. J pulled off the highway again and parked on a side street. The dogs barked and squealed when he got out of the car and walked around the corner. I dug in the grocery bag, found another stick of beef jerky, and split it for them.
A few minutes after J left me, a familiar vehicle appeared at the end of the road, rolled up to the car, stopped. Svenson. He must have left his brother’s house when J arrived, knowing that he’d find me hiding out somewhere nearby. He angled his truck so no cars could pass and got out. The dogs sensed a change in my mood—Sissy let out a low growl and Lucy joined her.
“Look what we have here,” he said. “The faggot longhair who wishes he was a woman.”
The growling grew louder as he came up to my door. He reached through the window, took some of my hair in his hand.
“Just like a bitch,” he said, then pulled my hair so hard that my head hit the doorframe.
Loose from his grip, I scrambled into the driver’s seat to get away from him and Lucifer lunged over my seat, closing his jaws around Svenson’s wrist. He shook the dog off and took two steps back. Blood ran down his arm and dripped from his elbow onto the street. Lucy barked, head out the window. Svenson walked backwards to his truck, eyes on me. Stood there staring until a horn sounded behind him.
“You’re going to pay for this,” he said.
After the horn sounded a second and third time he climbed into his truck and went on his way, bloody arm out the window.
J came back and wouldn’t stop talking. He kept saying that I wasn’t going to believe it, that I had to try it, over and over. He wouldn’t shut up. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise, let alone tell him about Svenson. When I finally told him to get to the point, he pulled over and showed me, and I was happy to see what it was. I longed for the contentment that my last night with the powder had given me and the mere sight of it in J’s hands cleared my mind of my problems with both Svenson and my mother. We could focus only on the task before us.
J didn’t ask me how I wanted it, grabbing a take-out spoon from among the garbage on the floor of the car and going to work. I looked away when it happened—he told me to hang my arm loose and then flex it and then it was done. All that remained was a small red dot in the crook of my elbow. A chemical taste bloomed inside me, vapors filling my lungs, and with these first breaths I had the feeling of smoking but backwards, the sweet taste of the drug mixed with an earthy flavor, a meaty, animal taste. Blood, sweat, salt, me.
I looked up from my arm to see that an awesome wave had formed on the horizon and was moving toward us. Strong winds blew fallen leaves and small animals around the car. My flannel and hair were flapping and I ran my hands down my chest to keep my shirt in place. The wave was moving with great speed, throwing houses and trees and telephone poles into the air and letting them fall where they may. Heavy raindrops exploded like bombs on the hood and windshield as the wave neared. I closed my eyes and felt the car fly up. I flailed with both arms to hold on to something, anything, but we didn’t tumble or tip—the car landed right where we had been. When I opened my eyes the wave was gone, the rain had stopped, and the wind was dying down. In my right hand was the door handle and in my left, J’s right. The taste remained.
“Maybe you aren’t asexual after all,” J said.
We sat there a moment, hand in hand. The day had taken on a dead calm, the sun beat down on the blacktop. I looked up at J, then down at our hands, then up at him again before pulling mine away. Embarrassed, I stared out the windshield. One of the dogs whimpered.
J started the car. Lit two cigarettes, gave me one.
“I was scared my first time too,” he said, pulling back onto the road. “You don’t need to feel bad.”
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. The clarity I felt was too strong; my mind couldn’t keep up. I took long, deep breaths while my cigarette burned away in my hand. Feeling a bit better by the time we got back to J’s, I found a pen and a scrap of paper an
d sat in the chair near the window, trying to describe the wave while he split and measured the rest of what he had picked up. It was a huge pile. I wasn’t sure what he was planning to do with it.
First, J gave me my hundred’s worth and took the same amount for himself. Then he chopped the rest into a pile on a round mirror before he left the room and returned with a bottle of vitamins. He took two pills, crushed them to powder, and mixed that into his pile of drugs. Then he put small amounts of the mixture on little squares of paper that he folded into envelopes.
“Let me know if that other friend of yours would be interested in this stuff.”
I shrugged and exhaled deeply.
“And if anybody asks,” he said without looking up at me, “you don’t know anything about any vitamins.”
* * *
We didn’t sleep for days that time. Running we were, hiding, J from his upcoming fatherhood and I from my mother, stringing ourselves along dose by dose, withholding long enough to let the withdrawals have their effects as well. The right amount of darkness caused the world to fold in on itself, the secrets of the universe spelling themselves out across the wall of my room at the Arlington, this window zooming in on the foreign world of which I had only caught glimpses previously.
J and I spent a couple afternoons cruising around Holm in Mary’s car selling J’s mixture of vitamins and crystal meth, telling people where he lived, and before long they started showing up at the Dairy Queen looking for us. Scary people. Twitchy eyes, pockmarked faces, missing teeth. These people were not happy, this parade of stick figures in clothes two or three sizes too big, a march of zombies. They were not riding waves when they got high, rather raising their heads out of the water for a single breath, a gasping for life, before dropping back into an abyss of darkness and bodily pain. J told me that we weren’t like the people who bought most of his product, that we would know when to stop, that we were too young to end up like them. I’d hang outside with the dogs while he went in and out of the house with his buyers and then when the sun went down we would move into J’s room and fix up ourselves.
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