by Paul Griner
That doesn’t make sense.
Yes it does, I said. I didn’t want to be pitied.
You liked me but you didn’t trust me.
No, it’s not that either. You ask, Any kids, and I answer, One, and you ask, Boy or girl, and I say Boy, and you say, What’s the most interesting thing about him, and I say, He got shot. How does a date go on from there?
I see, she said. Yes. When she lifted her hands from the leather steering wheel to check her speed they made a tearing sound, like Velcroed tabs being pulled apart. She said, Maybe it goes on from compassion? From trust?
At last I looked over at her, her lovely, lonely face. I felt terrible that the date had gone wrong and that I couldn’t reach out from my loneliness into hers, to bring her relief. It reminded me of a time I saw a sad-looking woman turning into a Burger King at dinnertime months before. She would eat alone and I would too. Why couldn’t I say to her, Hey, let’s go in and sit at a table and eat together? We can eat and talk and not be lonely for a bit, even if after we part our loneliness returns like a shadow. But of course, I didn’t. People would think me mad.
Now I said to Palmer, Thank you.
For a date at a stone-seller’s that didn’t go well?
For being kind. For thinking about how to raise difficult questions. I should have been more open from the start. I even liked your soft chin, I thought, though was smart enough not to say.
Thanks, she said. But don’t beat yourself up. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. Her mouth turned down. It never does, she said. It’s like that song. I’m bad at love.
Which is all we said, until we pulled up outside my apartment and she let me out and drove off.
Palmer in the Morning—Before She Dressed and Before I Made Her Sad
Pluses and Minuses
NOVEMBER 2016
Foraging in an old sketchbook, I find May’s yellowed Pluses and minuses list about a possible move tucked inside: a better job, a promotion, a raise, warmer winters, earlier springs, better schools, new friends for us and Liam vs: the loss of older friends, Otto’s need to re-establish his freelance business, more expensive housing.
Her notes appear in perfect outline form, unlike my messy scribblings, and I’m surprised she’d begun contemplating a move without even mentioning it, but suspect her initial silence had to do with kindness; why bring something up that might never happen? More surprising still is Liam’s list, a later addition, penciled in blue beside hers after we’d moved: North Clarendon Rutland Center Rutland Proctor Pittsford (+ in winter) Florence.
We took only two days to decide to move—the new job was simply too good an opportunity for May to pass up—but Liam’s list is a record of homesickness, detailing in differently sized lettering the whistles for outbound trains he’d hear from his Vermont bedroom at night that used to help him sleep, each a little farther away and a little quieter than the last. Church bells in our new place, but no train whistles, and only from the closest one, and those startled rather than soothed him.
I keep matchbooks and leaves, acorn caps and marbles, shells and smooth stones, bits of poetry and hand-painted postcards for my work, to contemplate, to draw, to train and retrain my hand and eye. I tuck the double list back in the sketchbook, planning to use it in the erasure book, but I won’t draw it. The minus side is missing the possibility that Liam will be shot.
Letters
There were Port-A-Potties on the scene of the supposed-school shooting within three hours. Who predicted their necessity and who requested them and why is there a higher priority for toilets than for paramedics if it was all true? And why, when I called the Port-A-Potty company to ask about this, did they say the information was classified? Classified! Classified toilets! The next day the police called and told me not to harass the company any more or I’d be arrested. A homicide detective. A Detective Sawyer! Why would a homicide detective waste his time about someone supposedly harassing a Port-A-Potty company if he had actual deaths to investigate?
Liam at Five
FALL 2012
He plucked a small black feather with white polka dots from a blazing red Mexican burning bush in the back yard, the size of a large peanut. I pulled a bird book down from my reference shelf and he stood beside me looking over the pages as I flipped through them.
Too many black birds to figure out now, buddy, I said after a few minutes, and snapped the book closed and put the feather in the top desk drawer. I had to get back to work so I said, I’ll take it to have it identified by someone who knows these things.
He nodded solemnly, a covenant. Instead I forgot about it, for years, one of the many things May tasks me for, my inattentiveness to the things she thinks matter the most.
You’re disorganized, she says. And it spills into your emotional life.
How do you organize your emotions? I want to ask her, but it’s a fight I can’t win, so I don’t.
Burger King
NOVEMBER 2018
I texted Lamont. You set me up with a blonde but I like brunettes. A diversion, before I texted the truth. Made a mess of it. I hadn’t eaten and it was cold and dark, so I walked up to the Burger King past people huddled in the bus shelter. No lonely-looking women sitting in a booth by themselves to tempt me into asking to eat with them, men either. Halfway through my second burger, Lamont texted back.
Attaboy! A drink soon to celebrate the end of celibacy! Successful date=audition for sex passed! It was good that he joked; he’d grown so angry recently he could have an argument in an empty house. I gripped my coffee in both hands for warmth.
Home, I sorted through my Kate video collection. That was her name in the first one, about 9/11. In later ones she went by different names, Phoebe and Amanda, but I always thought of her as Kate. The first thing I’d noticed was her throat. The crisp white blouse with the stiff collar, unbuttoned three or four buttons, no cleavage, a small chest, and the thin braided turquoise beaded necklace with its silver horseshoe shining against her smooth skin. It had made me want to meet her. Irrational, but so was everything then, and a quest I wasn’t about to abandon.
In this first one, the one on 9/11, and in all that followed, I liked her voice. East coast or mid-Atlantic, educated, with a little bour-bony huskiness and no voice fry, and what she said about architects and engineers, demolition experts, sounded reasonable. In between shots of Kate walking around lower Manhattan, she detailed the buildings’ odd collapses. She didn’t say there were no planes, she didn’t say they were dummy planes, she didn’t say the government was behind it. She did say that buildings didn’t fall that way, and never had, unless rigged with explosives to make them implode, and that I should be open to new possibilities. Superbly, she called into question the official story, which set me to doing some research on my own.
And I’d found inconsistencies and suspicious threads. The high number of Saudis involved in the hijackings, indicating that the royal family must have been involved, that a plane took off with dozens of Saudis for Riyadh the day after the attack, from Lexington, Kentucky, when supposedly all across the US all planes were grounded, that for years the government denied the flight ever happened until the pilot and copilot testified that it had. I sat. Outside it was growing dark.
Once again, Kate had lured me in, that easy inherent sexiness of her first video; they knew what they were doing when they cast her. And it was Kate I tried to follow, long after I’d given up on being a 9/11 Truther, which was long after May had grown tired of me talking about it. Not that I believed it, but I found a scintilla of it plausible, which, later, I came to realize was all hoaxers needed. I shut the computer off. Then I turned it on again and watched her walk in lower Manhattan once more. She was nice to listen to; for a few minutes in the otherwise quiet apartment, I forget how angry I’d grown at her, until the video where she denied the school shooting ever happened, that Liam was real.
If the government lied about 9/11, she said, why wouldn’t it lie about a school shooting? I can prove th
at “Liam” is a hoax, if you’ll listen. Such smooth cruel words, spoken in her lovely voice I’d grown to hate, that I wanted to silence.
Thursday
Ninety-six Americans will be killed with guns today; seven will be children or teens. Forty other children will be shot. Mostly male, mostly young, many unarmed.
Tatts, Temporary and Everlasting
FALL 2013
I piled up the dusty books on photographers and landscapes and birds. Old typefaces, graphics, fonts, I might use them for customers who wanted a retro look, or find images I could steal or alter. The things themselves, but also the pleasant quiet mindless poking in an antique store, as good as scrubbing floors for generating ideas. Nothing had clicked yet but I had faith it would and held up an old pale green rocks glass to the light to admire its weight and faceted shape. A woman stopped beside me, blinking through her bangs.
I said, I’ll be careful with it.
She said, Oh no, I was just noticing the rainbow. It arced across the other glasses from the one I was holding. You seem to have magic hands. Light-giving, she added, and blushed, as if she’d realized that sounded flirtatious.
She had a rich southern accent, so I said, Not local, are you?
A wry smile as she tucked her dark hair behind an ear with five silver studs climbing it. You could tell?
I smiled back. Shops like these were my métier and we had just moved to Rutland for May’s new job so I would be here often and it paid to make friends with the owners. I said, I’m semismart, in bursts. How’d you end up here?
The door to the back of the shop stuck as it opened and a tall thin man with a single silver streak shot through his black hair emerged after he put his shoulder to it. The woman looked at him as he and his wrinkled chambray shirt made their way behind the counter to ring up someone’s purchase and she was still looking at him when she said, I like to think by mistake. I didn’t have to ask more, but I wondered if once he hadn’t seemed to her like a man going over the top of a hill, singing.
The floors creaked. It had been an old schoolhouse and here and there on the walls children had carved their names into the dark wood. In among the fake antique Tiffany lamps and real faience bowls was a baseball book from the 1940s, my grandfather’s time. I leafed through it on the white marble top of an old tiger maple dresser. Some of the pages were foxed and it smelled of mold but I liked the pictures. The crowds of men dressed in suits for the ball-games, the outfield walls with their painted advertisements and the players’ old dark small leather gloves and baggy pants and shirts; it was a wonder they could even run. Inside, someone had tucked a sleeve of temporary tattoos. When I brought them home to Liam, he was sure they were as ancient as the book.
I let him believe it, thinking that plenty of mysteries would disappear for him soon enough. Together, we picked out two tattoos for him. A small flock of birds in flight across the underside of one forearm, wings up on some, down on others, and, on the underside of his other forearm, a heart rhythm with the end of the rhythm turning into the words C’est la vie. In school, his kindergarten teacher was reading Owl Moon to them in French.
On mine, I put an outlined map of the world, and Liam and I trooped upstairs to May’s office to show her. He ran ahead he was so excited, long hair flying.
May turned from her desk and held each of his arms in her hands in turn and studied them. She said, They look foolish, and turned back to the computer. Two windows open: an online jewelry site and a vintage Heathkit electronics site.
Liam said, Why do you ruin everything? He turned to trudge downstairs.
Her face stoic in the glow of the computer screen.
When I heard him in the kitchen getting out a bowl and cereal, I asked the same thing. That she’d crushed his happiness shocked me. For the first time, her nose looked too narrow for her face and I made a mental note to sketch it after.
May said, I don’t like the temporary tattoos because I don’t like permanent ones. She scrolled through the displayed necklaces. By shopping and not looking at me she was saying You’re so wrong I don’t even need to think about it.
She said, You apply those fake tattoos now? It’ll just encourage him to get real ones when he grows up. She ordered a simple silver necklace and closed the screen and tapped a few keys and the Heathkit fine print enlarged to 200 percent.
She knew I hadn’t left, but she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I did.
And what would be so bad about that? I said.
She leaned forward, pretending she needed to squint at something on the screen, and, satisfied, sat back and continued scrolling without looking at me, electronic kit after electronic kit.
I decided to outwait her but it didn’t take long. He came out of me as perfect as an egg, she said, fingers tapping the keys. The way we’re all created. I don’t want that ruined. And I don’t want you planting that idea in his head.
Three Knocks on the Window
NOVEMBER 1, 2015
Beside me in the hospital cafeteria, an older man wearing strategically unbuttoned blue coveralls topped his friends’ stories when he said his sister had lost her leg to infection after being bit by a mule. He scratched his pale smooth chest with his long fingernails and handed caramels to everyone and said, I want to buy a smaller walker. One with a tripod foot.
No response at first, as they fumbled with the crinkly wrappers, but at last one of the women said, Oh, you can get Mary’s. She put both hands under one heavy thigh in its bright pink tights and shifted it to the next chair and added, They’re selling it, now she’s dead.
Superstitious, I didn’t want to hear more, so I went to buy a coffee. Is the coffee fresh? I asked the server. The softest skin, her dark hair pulled back into a bun, a perfectly round bindi between her luminous brown eyes.
Her fingernails clicked on the touch screen. So fresh it’ll talk back to you, she said. I laughed, went for a walk. Liam’s second surgery wasn’t for a couple of hours and May was with him. On the street the smell of freshly baked bread, the smell of a dryer, the smell of cigar smoke drifting out open windows.
The weather had turned awful in the first days after the shooting–early snow, ice, sleeting rain—but today it was sixty and cloudy and sunny and half the city seemed to realize it was time to get outside, because it wouldn’t last.
Bicyclists, dog walkers and older couples moving slowly, mothers pushing baby carriages. One jogger with a pen through the ponytail sticking out the back of her baseball cap that swished back and forth like a wiper. I thought I might sketch her later, a good sign; I was entering the world again. I drank the coffee as I walked and some spilled onto my hand but I didn’t have a handkerchief or a napkin so when no one was looking I wiped my hand on a brick wall, scraping my knuckle.
On the next block, a man stood polishing the roof of his car with milk.
I asked, Does that work?
Don’t know, he said, elbow working as he pushed the rag in wide circles over the dull black paint. That’s what I’m trying to find out.
I went up a hill past a fifties brick apartment building and down the other side next to a field, empty except for a huge flock of starlings. At the sound of my footsteps, the birds rose a foot off the ground and settled in a wave, like a giant shaken iridescent blanket. When would I ever see anything like that again? It seemed a sign; Liam would be fine. I could draw that in several panels and turn it into a GIF for him, or a flipbook. My phone buzzed, May.
How soon will you be here?
I turned around. Fifteen minutes. The sun came out and created shadows of trees and cars and the sun dipped behind a cloud and the shadows faded away.
Don’t worry, I told myself. They’d said Liam was out of trouble. He’d been in the hospital a couple weeks and the facial fractures were healing on their own; this surgery was to set a broken arm. He’d begun talking to us, though he had no memory of the shooting. But I dropped the coffee in a trashcan so I could hurry and sucked at my bloody knuckle. Don’
t worry don’t worry don’t worry, I thought, making sure not to step on cracks as the world lighted and faded and lighted and faded.
Halfway there, two businessmen in matching blue suits stood looking at a construction fence, one standing behind the other on a bench. As I got closer he said, Hey, slow down. Hawk. You have to stand here to see it, and got down so I could.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, May’s tone. I didn’t want to have to explain so I stood on the bench and looked and sure enough there was a sleek falcon, perched on the flat tin roof of a construction trailer. Brown-and-white checked feathers and black eyes in a black hooded head, so still he might have been cast, a fierce raptor. An ill omen.
You don’t ever see those in this part of the city, the guy said.
The other said, Totally worth it. I don’t care if we’re late for the meeting. To me he said, Your finger is bleeding.
My phone buzzed again and I hopped down and hurried off, sucking my knuckle again, the taste of old pennies in my mouth. When the phone began buzzing constantly, I started to run, not caring what I looked like or who was in my way or that blood was dripping down my finger, and when I got closer I mistook the rumble of an idling parked truck for that of an approaching train and I sprinted so I could beat the train to the crossing.
You won’t make it, I thought, and didn’t stop, even after I realized my mistake.
Kate
I wondered why she stopped making hoaxer videos. Moved on to another cause? A possibility. Guilt? Because she’d achieved her goal, of getting people to doubt the truth? Or was she just an actor, not a true nonbeliever, now replaced by others?
I wanted to ask her all those questions and more, but to ask her, I had to find her. I would, I told myself, especially nights I lay awake filled with bourbon, and refined my search, during my relentless scrolling through hoaxer websites.