by Chris Dennis
“Why?”
“I ran over a dog.”
“Did the dog belong to someone famous?”
“No. Moron.” He’s quiet. He sits up, then lies down again. “Do you have kids?” he says.
“You know I don’t.” It’s like he’s forgotten who he’s even talking to.
“That’s right, you don’t. They’re not what you expect. It’s not like how you imagine. You think you can look at someone else’s kids and know what it’s like.” Donald lets down his ponytail. The hair falls forward, hiding his face. “When they’re yours it’s like they’re wild animals or something and you have to clean up their shit and keep them from burning the house down or running into the street during traffic.”
You want to get up. “I should sleep,” you say.
Donald grabs you. “You’re a fucking moron, Ricky.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re like every other motherfucker in here.”
You’re thinking he’s going to hit you. You get up but he just sits there with his hair in his eyes. “Why are you like the way you are?” you ask, but he doesn’t talk now. You reach out to touch him, but you smack him instead, without even thinking, across the face. You hit him in the head, and arms, then on the chest. You’re right up on him and both of your arms and hands are throbbing with the way it feels to touch him like this. You’re on top and he’s on the bed and you’re trying to give him what he wants. He’s yelling. He wants it to hurt. He wants it to hurt bad. He’s covering his face and moving toward the wall and pretending. He’s doing you a favor. He’s saying you’re crazy, someone help, you’re fucking nuts. The door opens and the guard is saying, “Ricky, get off. Back up!” The guard is in the room and he’s bending your arms behind you. He is pushing you out and holding your wrists against the middle of your back as he leads you into the long, loud hallway of men who are watching and whistling as you go by.
He takes you out of the cell block and into a room with pictures on the walls. There are chairs all around, like in a waiting area. Another guard drags one of the chairs toward the middle and handcuffs you to it. You’re in there alone for a long time, sitting in the chair, with a fiery and disordered ache still in your arms and face. Every so often you can hear the sound of something mechanical, an engine of some kind on the other side of the wall. There are shelves filled with magazines and thick paperbacks, and a small window, high up, with a white curtain. It is different in here, not like the rest of the prison. It is for employees, you think. That you’re handcuffed to the meager chair seems like a joke.
Eventually you hear the door, and the guard comes, with two little cups. “Here,” he says. One of the cups is full of water, and the other has a pill in the bottom, something small and yellow, and unfamiliar. “I can’t,” you say. “I can’t take it.”
“Yeah, you can. It’s fine.” He sounds bored, like he’s said this before. “I promise. Just swallow it. It’s so you can sleep.”
Stare at the pill, and then the guard. Recall the distant rapture of pharmaceuticals. “People get nervous, Ricky. You’re a kid. Shit is scary. Take the pill.”
Dump the pill out of the cup into your hand and put it in your mouth. Drink the water and swallow. The guard says to stand up and come with him. He walks you out of the room, down another hall into a different cell where there’s just a cot and a toilet. This is the hole. You know it once you’re inside. The door is closed and then it’s too dark to see. You feel your way around. The guard says he’ll see you later. You find the cot and lie down and think about Nanny for a long time until, finally, you’re seized by the miraculous buoyancy of the little pill. After that, there’s not much.
There is a long corridor of solid metal doors that eventually open to the prison yard, and then to an enormous parking lot, and beyond that the grass and the interstate where the cars pass all day long like birds migrating in both directions. In the morning no one talks about what happened. They give you a bus ticket and eighty-six dollars. “For food,” the man says, after he explains how long the trip will take, and the various stops, on the way back to Indiana. They give you the same clothes you were wearing when you came in. You don’t know how to feel about this. It’s like you’re supposed to walk out and pick up where you left off. You sit down on the floor and tie your shoes. You have forgotten about them. You see them on your feet and you’re shocked by the way they look.
A stocky lady wearing red lipstick and big sunglasses comes out from behind the desk she’s sitting at and says, “Come on, Ricky. I guess I’m taking you.” She talks into her radio. She says some numbers. You don’t know what they mean. You follow her out of the door and to a car. You’re not sure if you should open the car door yourself or wait for her to do it. She comes up behind you and puts her hand on your back and says, “You can sit up front—if you want.”
You get in the front seat of the car. The interior is hot. It feels good against the backs of your legs. Go with her, down the service road, onto the interstate. It’s a few miles to the bus stop, where there’s a sign in the window that reads give us your hungry, which seems very silly to you. This is not prison. This is a bus stop. Here the shoe meets the grass. After she drives off, you stand there for a long time. If you wanted you could stare down at the gravel parking lot all day. This is where people get up from their seats any time they want and maybe even walk to the North Pole if they think there’s something there worth walking to. It smells like dirt, and the bitter exhaust of so many buses. You’re like John Smith, you think, or William Clark, or Amerigo Vespucci, an eager frontiersman plodding off toward the darkest places.
This Is a Galaxy
When his father was only nineteen he moved to the United States from Turkey. The only things he brought with him were a black and green embroidered apron and a stolen library book titled The Universe. Some of the first words his father learned in English were words he’d read in the book. He sometimes used words from the book to describe random things: This or that was a supernova. A coworker was a black hole. The day’s electromagnetic energy was off. A room had too much gravity. The neighbor’s dog was a red dwarf. That guy at the deli, what a quasar.
Tamer sometimes pictured his father on an airplane wearing only the apron, holding the book in his lap. He had real memories too though. His father reading in bed, wearing his orange afghan like a cape. His father standing in front of the bathroom mirror, pulling his robe tight against his meager body while he sang along to Fleetwood Mac or Sezen Aksu, the queen of Turkish pop, sauntering demurely toward the mirror to give his reflection a little kiss.
Once, when he was maybe ten years old, Tamer used a box cutter and masking tape to make a flip-book out of the yearly portraits his father had taken of him at Sears. As the pictures flicked against his thumb he imagined how it might feel to grow up in an instant.
When Tamer tore the flip-book apart, his father asked, “What for? It was looking so good.”
“I don’t know,” Tamer said. “I just wanted to.” When Tamer stapled the pictures back together he put them in the wrong order, so that when he flipped through it again his face shifted between ages.
His father’s bedroom was like the smallest antique store, with a high four-poster bed in the middle and two walls of shelves on either side where he displayed his things: polished stones, finger cymbals, daggers with naked ladies carved into the handles, a model of the space shuttle Atlantis, many postcard photos of Stevie Nicks. The two of them lay in bed facing opposite directions, their backs touching. It was warmer that way. The windows were drafty. Tamer asked his father about a giant telescope in Arizona, then about an elevator in Ukraine that a person could ride from a mountaintop overlooking the Black Sea, straight down through the mountain to the beach below.
Sometimes he’d say to his father, “Tell me about the time my mother disappeared in the cave on Mackinac Island and was never seen again.” And his
father would tell him the story, or if he was in a bad mood, he’d say, “I never took her to Mackinac Island. We have never been there with her. The caves are shallow. You could not lose a ladybug in them, much less a lady.”
Other times, if he wanted to change the subject, his father would say, “I could tell one story about a summer in Afyon when moss covered the south side of every tree.” If you looked down at the two of them from above the bed, Tamer imagined, it appeared as if he’d grown from his father’s spine. He imagined himself as a small twin hanging there, his legs dangling even as his father walked around town, made the beds at work, riffled meticulously through the knickknack aisle at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.
His father sighed into the pillow. He said, “This is like baby. A ten-year-old should not always go to bed with the father. He should sleep on his own.”
“You always say that, but I’m still here,” Tamer said. “And I’m not tired, and you know what else?”
“You want to hear how I cannot hold open my eyes?”
“No, about the time the people in Turkey quit their jobs to burn corn, when you said they looked at the sky and knew they had to set the cornfields on fire.”
“It was wheat,” his father said.
Tamer pictured the bedroom ceiling unfolding like the lid of a giant box, revealing a vivid collection of stars above the house. He pictured his father being vacuumed into that far-off glitter. He pushed his feet beyond the length of the blanket and his father rolled over, burying his nose in Tamer’s hair. When Tamer closed his eyes again, his father had drifted even farther away into outer space—a single mote floating through the constant black.
“Okay, Tamer, the day your mother died I was in line at a bank, waiting. This was on Poplar Street, which is downtown Detroit. She was crossing Second Street. That was maybe two blocks from the bank we were at. I was cashing my paycheck and she was run over by a moving van.”
Tamer sat up. “Before you said it was a limousine. What was I doing?”
“It was an eighteen-wheeler. You were crying for a Dum Dum. You know, also, the saddest part, the day before she died we had a terrible fight and she cracked my favorite Diana Ross album, Silk Electric, over her knee. Like a stick! I had to throw it in the trash! It was the very next day she died.”
Tamer had no trouble talking to his father or to himself or to his father’s friend, Philip Point, but around anyone else his mouth seized—a blip traveled toward the back of his throat and scattered, like a spark. The counselor at school called it a speech phobia.
“Oh, but at home you should hear his wonderful English,” his father said to the counselor, misunderstanding the diagnosis. “He speaks as an adult!”
“Break your bread here, over the table or over the counter,” his father said in the morning, “or don’t break it at all and instead I will cut it in half for you with the bread knife if you will hand it to me. Let me see it.”
“Put lots of butter on it and I’ll eat it on the way to the bus stop,” Tamer said.
“Look at you. Your shirt is inside out.”
Tamer put his shirt on the right way and took the bread and walked down the street to the bus stop where the other children waited in their colorful jackets. He positioned himself just beyond the clutch of rowdy grade-schoolers and didn’t speak. He stared down at the sidewalk, counting the cracks.
During the day his father worked at the Sunrise Motel on Chase and Ford as a housekeeper and desk clerk. In the classroom at Lakeside Primary, rummaging through a pencil box, Tamer felt dull and forgettable as a stone. During recess he paced the perimeter of the gymnasium. Each lap was a segment he could clip from the day, an hour scored into strips until there was nothing left, until a voice came over the garbled intercom, saying, “Bus seventeen riders please report to the north entrance.”
There were times late at night when Tamer should have been asleep that he’d hear his father’s music and go into the living room to find him curled up on the couch, wearing his special satin robe with the long braided belt, laughing and telling jokes with his friend Philip. Philip and Tamer’s father would sometimes stare at each other for a long time, taking sips from the same bottle of Seagram’s Seven until one of them turned to courteously exhale his cigarette smoke.
“Go into bed, Tamer,” his father said at the sight of him in the hallway.
“I’m going to sleep with you,” Tamer said.
“No, sir. Good night, please.”
“Hello, Philip,” Tamer said. “These pajamas are new. You can come in here and talk to me.”
“No, he will not,” his father said.
Philip and Tamer’s father sat on the couch with their legs overlapping, smoke rising from the overfilled ashtray on the table, Perseus or Gemini lighting up the sky outside the long bay window behind the stereo cabinet. The house lights were out but the moon and the constellations shone into the living room as Tamer ran his fingers across the raised pattern of the wallpaper, heading slowly back down the hallway in the dark. In the other room his father and Philip would whisper and laugh, and the bottle would clink against the ashtray while the music played, until Tamer finally lay in bed long enough to reenter a dream—to cross from thinking to sleeping like a cloud thinning out in the sky.
Then there was a situation at the grocery store. It was close to dark and the temperature had dropped several degrees during the half hour they’d spent inside. This is how Michigan is. Two men inside of Food Pride followed Tamer and his father out to the parking lot. The tall one said, “Excuse me, ma’am, can we help with the groceries?” The heavy one laughed and a blast of breath rose from his mouth. They grabbed their crotches and blew kisses and the tall one said, “Listen, baby, what are you doing later? Where’s your husband?”
“He’s got lipstick on,” the heavy one said, both of them erupting into a fit of laughter.
When they reached the car, his father said, “Shut up, both of you. There’s a child in this backseat. Just go from here!”
But the tall one reached out, touching Tamer’s father on the arm, saying, “No one gives a shit if we’re out here, baby. You’re in America now. We just wanna look at you.” The man leaned forward, bringing his face in close as if he were about to kiss Tamer’s father right on the lips. “Sexy faggot,” he said, “I can’t stop looking at you. I’m lost in your pretty eyes.”
The heavy one was standing by, smiling, then not smiling. He watched Tamer sitting there in the backseat, holding the toy he’d gotten from the coin machine at the checkout. The heavy one coughed into the shoulder of his jacket, thrust his hands deep into the pockets. Tamer’s father got into the car and slammed the door. When he started the engine and began to pull off, one of them smacked his hand hard against the roof, making a sound like thunder inside the vehicle.
In the backyard Tamer would assemble Erector sets, the structures eccentric and lopsided. He’d build them and take them apart, slipping unevenly, helplessly, toward adolescence.
One day a package arrived in the mail. “I waited for you to get here,” his father said. It was from his aunt, his father’s sister, in Afyon.
Years later Tamer would receive a letter too. He’d notice how the aunt’s Turkish script crept into her written English the same way it had his father’s, the barbed handwriting like black fingernail clippings thrown across the page. He’d hear his father in the letter, his voice with all its foreign blunders. Tamer would stand in the foyer of his apartment building, a grown man, facing the elevator. The elevator doors were old and wouldn’t close all the way but the car kept going as he stepped forward, putting his hands on either side of the frame so he could lean in to gaze up at the elevator ascending into darkness. A bulb would flash, red, then dark again, filling the shaft like gas flooding a line. Partly it’d be the mechanism of the elevator, the tense roar of the engine, the pulsing light, the raw pink of dusk coming through the
plate-glass doors behind him, all of it making it seem like every door could be a portal into the past, every opening a chink in time where he could swiftly pass into that long-ago living room to sit on the couch next to his father. There’d be music playing in one of the first-floor apartments, and a woman by the mailboxes pouring vodka into a soda bottle. Outside would be the sharp climate of near-spring in Detroit.
Before opening the package, his father had explained to him that in Afyon there were no yards to play in, just miles of cramped buildings and houses and a castle built high on a hill of volcanic rock in the center of the city, every brick road sloping toward the countryside. He told Tamer about the restaurant that was also a library, where he had stolen the book about the universe. “It was the only English book, hidden behind the others, but I like it most for the pictures.” His father explained that on his nineteenth birthday he’d left the library with the book in his satchel, and how during the months that followed he’d applied for a passport, planning a trip to the United States with money an uncle had sent him on the condition he’d come to work at the uncle’s motel until the debt was repaid. His father stayed working at the motel, even after the young American couple took it over and the uncle, claiming he was bored with the cheapness of Western lodging, returned to Turkey.
“Now we will open the mail! How exciting this is!” his father said, carefully getting at the box with a nail file, lifting out the contents and laying them on the table before Tamer as if he were presenting him with two precious heirlooms. Wrapped in orange tissue paper was a box of cookies and a videotape. There was a note attached to the video by a thick rubber band. His father read it aloud in Turkish, not even bothering to translate.
“Should we watch?” his father said.
“Okay,” Tamer said, “and I’ll eat the cookies?”
“Do you know what kind they are? They are special.”
“So I can’t eat them?”