Here Is What You Do

by Chris Dennis

  Mary Ann did not agree. All night the smell of the men in the room woke her. She’d fallen into a less panicked state during sleep, the panic replaced by a circuitous burning that whirred in the pit of her stomach, drowning out every other emotion—her whole existence narrowed to an X-rated pinhole. In her dreams the sweat-drenched men came to her, and she welcomed them, as if fulfilling her anatomical destiny, receiving all three of them at once. They rotated around her like a powerful, slick machine, filling every hole. She woke with her hand in her shorts, the dream still lingering on her as she reached over in the dark, feeling for whoever was next to her. It was the Cuban, she was sure, running her hand through his chest hair. Before the sun came up she’d coaxed him into the bathroom, leaving the door open, hoping the others would come in as well. They did not. But by the time it was over she was grateful they hadn’t. It wasn’t an entirely erotic situation. The room turned sour. Her feet ached from the cuts and a thin horn whined from one of the floors beneath. The Cuban had wept. He’d mentioned his wife again, even though Mary Ann made the considerate gesture of bending herself over the sink so he could get at her from behind. When that didn’t work, she’d finished herself off by grinding against his stubby, shaky fingers. Was she in charge of anything at all? What power did she have over the world? She had wanted to comfort him, in a way, but also it was hard to feel anything but revulsion toward the sobbing.

  Lying at the end of the bed, staring at the green-lit window, she felt drugged. She was an animal in distress. Didn’t it always seem like the most natural course of action, though? Until it was over. In hindsight, the majority of her sex longings called to mind the image of a person climbing out of quicksand, or crawling out of her own loose skin in an attempt to escape the hot slop of her messy insides. She could still smell the Cuban on her, and it made her stomach turn. The smell of him reminded her of a food item she’d once eaten and not enjoyed.

  After the sun began to streak across the murky room, with its odor and edginess, she started to worry that Pauline would hear the news about the earthquakes and become hysterical. When she was home, Mary Ann decided, she would attempt a more patient friendship with Pauline.

  The men went out again to help clear debris from the stairwells and Mary Ann hid in the bathroom with the door locked, dipping a washcloth into the back of the toilet. They’d be upset with her for using the only drinking water, but it felt so good, and eased her, knowing her face and vagina were clean. She used a drop of scented shampoo on the cloth too.

  She was certain that Pauline would see the whole ordeal as a kind of punishment. “Don’t you see the relationship?” she’d plead—as if a person’s deeds were balloons pushed underwater, inevitably popping up at crucial points along the surface of a life. Good grief, Pauline, always such a know-it-all, even at the worst of times, when all a person needed was compassion!

  Mary Ann would make sure to stress, again, that she had not paid for the trip.

  It was true that Pauline had been extremely willing during those stupefying months after Bill’s death. She’d been the only one helping Mary Ann care for Danny. He was four years old and cried almost constantly. Somehow Bill and Pauline had never minded spoon-feeding the boy, but Mary Ann refused. What sort of precedent did it set, she’d ask, as Danny flung himself on the floor, smearing his body in oatmeal.

  After Bill’s funeral the fantasies arrived. Like a sack of soothing demons on the doorstep, transmitting images into her brain for hours on end. The worst of them: snatching Danny from his playpen and throwing him against the living room wall. Also, on the days when Pauline was gone, filling the child’s drink cup with sedatives. What had stopped her? The thought of being ostracized, or imprisoned?

  She’d made a habit of observing the starlings on the power lines outside the bathroom window, after several whiskey and waters. All day, whiskey and water. This had helped. With all of the kid’s problems, being alone with him, without Bill, her body switched off, like a fuse in a house with too many appliances running at once. A baby, a child at all, was never something she’d wanted. She knew this like she knew all of her aversions—that she hated bluegrass music, and eggplant, and badly behaved dogs. He’d been for Bill. And with Bill gone, what was the point? Suddenly the idea of an animal eating its offspring seemed perfectly natural. She was surprised it didn’t occur more often. But how to say this, in a world full of women dying to be somebody’s mother?

  Where was there room for her to grieve? There was a savage in her midst. He’d swallow small toys whole, hardly blinking. The looks of the emergency room staff became intolerable. For someone else, maybe, this kind of calamity could have been a distraction, but for her the two nightmares played out in unison, folding over each other, enclosing her. She hid in the garage, pretending to search for some lost thing while Danny howled on the kitchen floor, lost in the frenzy of a tantrum. If she did try to approach him, he’d kick her, spit in her face. If she went to another room to escape, he’d follow her, beating his head and fists on the door until she let him in, so that he could continue the fit at her feet. He demanded a witness. Once she found him on the neighbor’s outdoor patio, smacking himself in the mouth, blood dripping down his chin. During a family barbecue! He rarely spoke to her. Only a universe that prided itself on manifold sicknesses, on its own ironic design, would offer something so unlovable to someone so unmaternal.

  Rather than bashing in his head, though, she retired to the bathroom, where she crushed up her anxiety medication into smooth, perfect lines that she snorted off the bathroom sink with a straw.

  “Come out of that bad place, Mother!” she would say to herself in the mirror. “Transform! Wake up!”

  But she couldn’t.

  When she had truly given up and arranged for Danny to move into a facility, the world, begrudgingly perhaps, seemed to right itself. There was shame, sort of, but also peace. The peace was louder. The house droned in commiseration. It was as if a hole had opened, causing a great pressure to escape her. A giant cork had been removed. And there was a place for everything now, for everyone, to come in and fill her up again. She did visit him, on some weekends, at first, until the director of the facility advised her to stop.

  People who you loved were simply with you and alive, and then they were not. How does one move forward? It depended on who you were, she guessed, as to which method one might use. At first, her only desire was to lie down on a clean sofa somewhere, one that didn’t reek of human urine. But then other things presented themselves, generously.

  On the afternoon following the day of the earthquakes, as Mary Ann and the others sweated it out in their room, announcements of an official rescue began to circulate. Mary Ann and the men shared a small bag of pork rinds, even played tic-tac-toe, passing the sheet of paper and the snack around in a circle. They could hear what sounded like instructions over a megaphone, being given to the occupants of an apartment building farther up the beach. The captain kept going to the window, hanging his head out, trying to hear. The smells unleashed each time he lifted the glass were ripe with salt and rot.

  Maybe, in the end, she was grateful for Danny’s condition. It had given her a reason to flee. Ages later, it felt, she’d risen from that disgusting season, that double nightmare, into a new body, replete with a stylish condo from all the insurance money.

  Right before she’d left on the trip, hours before she was scheduled to be at the airport, she and Pauline had met for lunch, to say goodbye and for Mary Ann to leave a key to the condo. Pauline was going to turn on some lights at night and water the only houseplant—a bromeliad that tolerated neglect so well Mary Ann hardly watered it herself. It was unnecessary, but Pauline wanted to be useful. Good old Pauline.

  The argument, if you’d even call it that, came out of nowhere, right after the food was served. Pauline laid both of her hands on the table and said, “He tells me things.”

  “What?” Mary Ann had said, s
till chewing. She truly despised Pauline the most for things like this. “Who? Who tells you things, Pauline?”

  “Danny, when I go to the facility to see him, or when we talk on the phone, which isn’t often really, on the phone, because he gets excited. Oh, his speech has improved, Mary Ann, enormously.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” Mary Ann had hissed, driving her knife deep into the meat on her plate, causing the pink juice to puddle around her steamed vegetables.

  “Mary Ann, you wanted to know and so I’m telling you.”

  “I did? When did I ever say such a thing?”

  “The loan would have been for him,” Pauline said, looking down at her tuna cakes. This was how Pauline approached every difficult situation, lowering herself, pretending to be humble in all her endless judgement. “It’s getting so expensive to drive out there, Mary Ann, and you know they don’t provide for everything he needs. They send me home with a list every time. But it’s not like I mind. I do not mind. I just haven’t been working as much.”

  “I hope you understand,” Mary Ann had said, clutching her cutlery, “that I see this as a total betrayal. Who told you to visit him? It goes against policy.”

  “Oh, stop.” Now Pauline was waving a hand, acting like it was nothing. “A child just needs familiars. That’s all. You know? I couldn’t stand the thought of him not seeing a friend. He’s taking classes now. Math, science. The other day he called just to tell me about Mars! Isn’t that funny? Like I’d never heard of Mars. He gets excited. He actually said, ‘Do you know about Mars?’ I laughed and laughed. Fascinating stuff. You never get too old to learn!”

  Mary Ann could only hone in on the blood floating across her plate, how it made islands out of her side dishes. The steak was too rare. Sweat was pouring down her spine, dampening the back of her blouse. The knife upon the soiled napkin suddenly seemed to her like the most poignant thing she’d ever witnessed.

  “It was the seasons on Mars that really got him. Did you know other planets have seasons? It’s common knowledge, I guess. And I mean, it makes sense, but maybe it wouldn’t occur to everyone. ‘I’ll spend summers on Mars!’ he said. He knows that isn’t possible. He just liked saying it. He does that, repeating things. I had to get off the phone because he wouldn’t stop yelling.”

  Apropos of the whole ordeal, a light snow had begun to fall outside the restaurant. Mary Ann’s seat was facing the window. The weather enraged her. It wasn’t even winter yet. Much of the snow melted before it hit the pavement.

  “I can’t wait for the damn sunshine,” Mary Ann said, nodding toward the street. “I’ve always felt I was more suited to a tropical climate.”

  “A Martian summer is still just dead-cold. Cold upon cold,” Pauline continued.

  Mary Ann could not bring herself to entertain another word. She thought of Mexico instead, of the Cuban and his expensive yacht.

  “Not as cold as it is the rest of the time, though. It’s the strange mixture of gases, I think, that do it. You think you’ve got it bad, Mary Ann? Those are seriously harsh conditions!”

  Mary Ann was certain she already knew this information. From school? From Bill? Something about how there were no bodies of water to retain the heat? No oceans, no beaches. Regions of Mars, even in summer, were still cold enough to crack your bones. Pauline could be such a condescending bitch. “Pauline, you condescending bitch,” Mary Ann finally said, the knife somehow back in her hand, thrusting forward. “Everyone knows all of this.” She had to put Pauline in her place. She had to stop the onslaught of hostility!

  “Please put down the knife,” Pauline had said.

  But before Mary Ann had walked outside to wait for her cab in the snow, leaving Pauline alone at the table with her fish, she’d added, harshly, “You’re not a mother, Pauline. But just imagine you were, and imagine you could choose to do something else instead. And suddenly the world opened its arms to you! And strangers wanted to take you to explore remote and exotic locations. It’d be a sweet, wonderful day and I’d be happy for you. I’d celebrate!”

  Of course now, in the rank hotel, she wished she hadn’t said any of that, and not just because the days that had followed seemed like a kind of punishment after all, like a snarky reckoning. But because it wasn’t the point. In the sickening hotel room, waiting and waiting, she played the conversation over in her head, wishing she’d said something else entirely, something like, “Listen, old friend, there is no way in hell a Martian summer is harsher than all of this!”

  Gordon Now

  Every day now Gordon is somewhere: standing in the hallway with his hands in his pockets when I flick on the overhead light, ducking quickly into the water-heater cabinet, pulling the little door shut behind him. Sometimes I whisper from the other side, “What are you doing?” But he doesn’t say anything and when I open the door he’s gone. Other days I’ll go out to start the car in the morning and he’s lying faceup in a snowdrift by the driveway, just staring up at the dark sky. When I go out again later, the sun is coming up and he’s gone again. He’d find it funny, I’m sure, how uncomfortable I get. He’d probably say, “Stop acting like a girl.” He was always trying to scare me and shit. Now he’s dead. And I’m left with this.

  When he first disappeared it felt like I was lodged in a narrow pipe, stuck like a clog, waiting to be flushed—and then, months later, like I was dead too, a shriveled-up corpse inside another bigger corpse, trying to find my way out. Grief builds up around me like plaque.

  The whole time, people kept saying he’d run off to Chicago or Bowling Green with some girl, or his dealer. Gordon wasn’t someone you could count on. But I knew. Somehow.

  Now the fucking van kids come and drag me out into the cold to party all night. “It’s a proper funeral!” they say. “A fun one! We have to do it, for Gordon! You need this.” Like they’re trying to help. It’s an excuse to use drugs. Everything is.

  We head out into the country, where someone’s parents own a cabin and a giant barn. From the stables to the barn doors there is dancing. Everywhere is the smell of animals and animal waste. The barn looks like it’s been cleaned, but the smell lingers. Someone has tied a bubble machine to a rafter and it fills the air around us with trembling orbs. We haven’t been here ten minutes and for some reason I’m grinding, half-assed, against this Persian chick I hardly know from Steelville.

  Eventually, I do some back flips—straight up and then down. I almost land in the spot where I jumped. Everyone has cleared a spot for me. The Persian chick gets swallowed by the crowd like a weak drink. The subwoofers are covered in forty ounces. I wonder if I could down them all. When the spotlights rise, I watch the liquid shudder inside the bottles. The synthesizers are squealing and the sound lights up the stables—all red and smoldering. “Holy shit,” someone says, and then I’m pressed between all these fucking people, standing on my toes to see what’s going on. I take someone’s Olde English from the speaker. A tablet has settled in it—almost dissolved. I can see the last orange bit. The “holy shit” was about me, I realize—someone going on about the flip. I just tip the bottle and gulp, taking even the hot froth. The strobe lights go quick and a giant bubble descends like a glass planet—impaled tenderly on a glow stick.

  I wonder how I’ll get home.

  I watch through a circular window as the snow blasts across the harvested fields. Reflecting in the glass, over the cut rows, a mirror ball revolves. Finally, I break a fucking sweat.

  They found Gordon three days ago, after years of searching, and then not searching anymore. His bones and teeth, at least—every piece covered in bright algae. They showed his mother a photo of the spot. They offered her the remains. She called me and told me to go get them. “They’re yours,” she said. “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, but she was like, “You damn well know it does.” She hung up on me. The body was not a body anymore. What was it? A joke told incorrectly? A
handful of glowing stones?

  Or something. Go figure—he was always saying this, meaning he expected bad things to happen. And pretty much they did.

  Girls bounce by—tits, big asses—their slick ponytails pivoting behind them like the tails of actual ponies. What else? The Marishi sisters pop and lock on a speaker box wrapped in blue Christmas lights. Their expressions match—bitchy—and their limbs glitch in unison. Some punk in an arm cast fakes a sweep drop near the kegs. The other people here are totally gone. Only their sweaty bodies are left, shiny and empty as athletes.

  I hide beside the fog machine, freestyling, trying to lose myself. I used to be able to do that. I attempt a couple of air flares. When I open my eyes the girlie boys have huddled around me like pets. Like they want something.

  Gordon was a terrible dancer. He didn’t know what to do with his arms. His body flailed. He could fight though, and somehow was graceful as an animal at it.

  “You don’t come to the Shoe Factory anymore,” the boys say, bumping hips, one after the other in a long row, before sending it back again in the opposite direction. “The kid on the Wavetable tonight is serious. Too bad it’s a Yamaha. That’s fucked-up about Gordon,” they say.

  Man, they’re rags, downers.

  That they would even say his name, it splatters like poison.

  “My buddy says it’s probably not Gordon,” the one in red glasses confides. “He says it’s some hippie who drove his car into the strip pit five years ago.”