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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2010

You Can't Forgive What You Can't ForgetDavid Rodriguez

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

YOU CAN’T FORGIVE WHAT YOU CAN’T FORGET

By

DAVID RODRIGUEZ

A Thesis submitted to the

Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Degree Awarded:

Summer Semester, 2010

Copyright © 2010

David Rodriguez

All Rights Reserved

ii

The members of the committee approve the thesis of David Rodriguez defended on

March 15, 2010.

__________________________________

Mark Winegardner

Professor Directing Thesis

__________________________________

Elizabeth Stuckey-French

Committee Member

__________________________________

Julianna Baggott

Committee Member

Approved:

_____________________________________

Kathleen Yancey, Chair, English

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

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For Elizabeth

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There is not enough space to thank everyone who has helped me along the way, but I

would like to single out Elizabeth Kelly, Kathy Rodriguez, John Wang, Rose Bunch,

Azita Osanloo, Mark Winegardner, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Julianna Baggott.

Without their patience, guidance, and support, this thesis would not be possible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ................................................................................................ vi

Ogre Battle ................................................................................................ 1

Let Me Lay a Truth Bomb on You ............................................................. 14

Promenade ................................................................................................ 17

Survivor ................................................................................................ 27

Toot Sweet ................................................................................................ 39

A Mansion down the Road ......................................................................... 53

Go to Sleep ................................................................................................ 64

Biographical Sketch .................................................................................... 74

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ABSTRACT

You Can’t Forgive What You Can’t Forget is a collection of short stories submitted in

partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Fine Arts. The stories are

responses to the various ways Hurricane Katrina devastated not only the Gulf Coast region, but

also the inner lives of the region’s inhabitants. However, the stories do not always approach the

subject directly. Rather, they are thematically connected to the event by raising questions about

recovery, progress, and compassion that speak to the universal emotions surrounding any kind of

tragedy that might disrupt the structure of a person’s daily life.

For instance, in “Ogre Battle” a boy comes to recognize the similarities between himself

and his parents, and he is led to the epiphany that he is not as strong as he thought. In “Let Me

Lay a Truth Bomb on You,” a man is faced with the sudden destruction of his home and tries to

convince himself that something impossible has happened, because the reality of the situation is

too hard to take. In “Survivor,” two teens set out from their backwater town and are irretrievably

drawn back into the world they wish to escape. In “A Mansion down the Road,” the protagonist

reaches the symbol of his escape and finds it to be no better than where he came from. Finally, in

“Go to Sleep,” a man lies in bed with his children, considers his legacy, and recognizes that he

must take control of his life because the world will not simply offer him pity.

This thesis arose from a long and complex process of revisiting personal experiences and

trying to find a prism through which they could be viewed by others in more universal terms.

Along the way, inspiration was found in the works of Junot Diaz, George Saunders, Ethan Canin,

Adam Haslett, Donald Ray Pollock, Tom Piazza, Wells Tower, Roberto Bolaño, Michael

Chabon, Richard Yates, Stokes Howell, Stuart Dybek, Richard Ford, Antonya Nelson, Tim

Gautreaux, Tobias Wolff, Steve Almond, Tom Franklin, Ron Carlson, Haruki Murakami, Chuck

Klosterman, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, John Biguenet, Raymond Carver, Flannery

O’Connor, Richard Price, Dave Eggers, Andrea Barrett, Kevin Canty, Sherman Alexie, Richard

Bausch, and my committee members.

1

OGRE BATTLE

Pete ran so fast he became a blur, starting at his bedroom door and hurtling towards the

end of the hallway where he made a pinpoint turn right, bouncing off the doorframe on his way

outside. His mom choked on the words, “Where are you going?” She was crying again. No doubt

his dad would be, too, after she guilted him about Dominique—the lady with the red curls whose

name made Dad yell, “Jesus Christ!” They called Pete “slovenly”? They thought finding him

shirtless in his room, fist-pumping to the “Dreadful Fight” during Milon’s transformation, meant

he had zero dexterity? They were studies in weakness.

Hold on, though. He heard, “Chocolate on your pants.” Glancing over his shoulder, he

saw it was true. He must have sat on a Mars bar during E.V.O.’s cut scenes. In the game, Gaia

had congratulated him for defeating the Great White with his sea monster, an awesome

combination of swordfish horn, shell body, and Kuraselache fin. The battle had taken so long,

he’d probably flopped down in exhaustion. He needed to improve his endurance. But no matter.

Today only, the game store was holding Ogre Battle.

“I gotta get to the mall,” he said.

Bills were stacked at his father’s end of the table, held in place by the big Texas

Instruments graphing calculator. His mom sat at the other end, holding two drenched tissues and

sporting red eyes. “I could take you,” she said.

“Don’t coddle him,” his father said.

His dad was right. That was the best way to appear weak in public. “I’m fine,” Pete said.

“I’ll get exercise.” And he was out the door without saying goodbye.

The bus dropped him off at the edge of the parking lot. He started sweating before he got

to the mall doors. First thing was first: the food court for chicken tenders to eat as he walked.

Sweet, delicious chicken tenders, basting in barbeque sauce in his mouth. He loved their

crispiness, and the gentle resistance of the white flesh, and the pepper, and the tangy hit of the

barbeque sauce, and the grooves his teeth left after a bite. He loved the mall, too. It was called

“Esplanade,” which was a French word that meant “chicken tenders.”

He devoured them, jogging up the steps to the second floor instead of taking the

escalator. He wasn’t lying to his parents; he really did want to get some exercise. You can’t

avoid starting at Level One, but you can improve yourself. Even as a ten-year-old, he understood

2

that. To his Mom, calling the store every day to see if Ogre Battle had come in yet was wasted

effort. “Wait,” she liked to say, “and good things will come.” But this was not an ordinary game,

nor was it certain it would be released—pre-order or not.

A year ago he’d written what he thought was an eloquent and convincing letter to

Nintendo of America. He’d read about Ogre Battle in their magazine, he said, and it would be a

mistake to keep it from an American release. A real time strategy game for the Super Nintendo

was rare enough, but one made by Quest with Mode 7 scrolling and a soundtrack by the, as he

deemed it, criminally underappreciated Hitoshi Sakimoto made this a landmark achievement. To

be able to watch a sunset as your characters traveled across a war-ravaged landscape, or to use

Tarot cards to call upon gods like Loki to bludgeon your enemies to death, would not only

advance the cause that video games were art as much as a Monet, but also solidify Nintendo’s

reputation as an innovator in the field. He ended the letter asking if it was true what one review

said. Could he become the master of his own destiny with this game?

Their response was in his pocket. “Yes!” they said. “You are in control of the entire

army, and your fate will be shaped by your actions. That is what makes Ogre Battle so special.

With more fans like you, Americans will be able to enjoy it, too.” Catching sight of the store

clerk shelving copies of the game, a portion of the meager 25,000 that Pete had helped get onto

American shores, he repeated those words: “You are in control.” He had done this.

It was heavier than he expected, like he was holding the weight of the 120 characters

inside the cartridge. The cover showed many of them—two groups of warriors facing off

including mermaids and valkyries and sexy fairies on one side, knights and clerics and beastmen

on the other. But there were many more named characters, too, plus the sixteen classes of

fighters and in each of those multiple subclasses. It was so sweet that he wanted to lick the

cardboard box. It was sweeter than sweet. He closed his eyes and breathed in what he dreamed

was the smell of Japanese mountain air.

He paid the clerk, a lanky teenager in an over-sized Polo shirt, all one hundred dollars

without regret. After the scrape of the cash tray, the game made a satisfying thud in the plastic

bag. Pete thanked the clerk for ordering it for him and asked that the store manager be thanked,

too, which is something he’d heard his mother say when she returned clothes to the department

store. Then he wrapped the bag around his wrist and turned towards the door.

3

Two guys were standing in his way. “Kid, you got a lot of money for someone who shit

his pants,” the tall one said, so tall Pete had to look up to stare into his chest. He wore an Auto

Value shirt that said “King Krunch Racing” and rode up his arms, which were the size of fence

posts.

The kid next to him wore mesh shorts and a T-shirt with a faded picture of a tiger. He had

shiny, gelled hair and red soda stains around his mouth. Couldn’t have been taller than four feet.

“Looks like you got a turdwaffle on your butt,” he said.

“Are kids with shit on their pants usually poor?” Pete said, his voice wobbling in his

throat.

“Poor enough to die,” the tall one said.

Pete considered this. So kids with shit on their pants usually died. But not always. The

strength in his limbs scattered like cockroaches behind a wall.

“Do you like putting stuff in your butt?” the short one asked, pushing Pete’s shoulder.

Pete tried to walk around them, and they stepped in his way. He took another step and

bumped into the tall one.

“We asked you a question,” the tall one said, his face reddening. He squinted his eyes.

“Don’t you speak English?”

“You can’t block people from leaving the store,” Pete said. He looked at the clerk. “You

gonna do anything?”

The clerk shrugged. “This is going to be the most interesting part of my day.”

Pete heard one of the kids laughing about “turdwaffle.” He brushed past them, and then a

hot sensation shot up his back. He stumbled into a display, knocking a stack of boxes to the

ground. Something had gone straight up his butt.

The tall one smiled and blew on his finger like it was a smoking gun barrel.

Pete closed his hands into fists, but couldn’t remember if his thumb was supposed to go

inside or outside the other fingers. The two guys laughed and moved towards him. What had

Bruce Lee said? Jeet Kune Do meant “the way of the intercepting fist.” Seven times seven

equaled forty-nine. Pete stared into the yellow eyes of the tiger on the short one’s shirt, breathing

like he’d just run a 5K.

4

Suddenly, a man wearing glasses stepped out of the back of the store. He looked to be in

his forties, with a gut as big as Pete’s. “Get out of my store,” he said. “Go, or I swear I’m going

to kill you all.”

The tall bully turned his attention to the manager, and Pete made a break for it out the

door and into the mall crowd. Running past a group of old women in windbreakers, he held the

game close and crossed the atrium, passing the restaurant where he always stopped for chicken

tenders. The outside doors closed behind him without anyone following, as far as he could tell.

By that point, he was breathing too hard to see straight. No time to relax; he headed for the bus.

Back in his bedroom, Pete tried to forget what they had said. That was embarrassing, but

not a critical hit. Just an example of being Level One, proof that he needed to increase his stealth,

subterfuge, and awareness. One day, he’d slice their ass open with a Masamune and hear the

victory theme. Until then, the pain would be a reminder of the job he still had to do. First step:

get his head out from under the pillow.

After he popped the cartridge in, two timpani hits boomed out of the TV’s speakers,

followed by a trumpet fanfare—a confirmation that victory was on its way. A twirling red card

appeared over the words “New Game,” which he clicked, and then a 3D wizard standing atop a

mountain asked his name. Knowing almost no one else in America had seen this gave him goose

bumps. He entered “Pete” and answered a series of questions about how he would rule his

kingdom. There were four possible results he’d read about: high, mid/high, mid/low, and low

alignments. Your choices to the questions determined how strong you were, like a road map to

toughness. Pete just needed to memorize the formula. Seeing a falling star the night before a

battle, what would he wish for? Definitely bravery. If he was standing in front of a mirror that

showed his best trait, would it be physical, mental, or moral strength? He wanted it to be

physical, but that’s what the game was going to inspire him to achieve. He chose “mental.” If he

could only save one person from the flames of battle, would it be his decrepit mother, his

beautiful lover, or his child? None of these appealed to him, so he chose “child.” Then a flash of

lightning blinded his view of the wizard. It was time to see the character that had been created

for him.

He was so excited he didn’t hear his mom knocking.

“It’s dinner time,” she said.

5

He threw the controller at the TV. “I can’t even get a second.” But he didn’t turn the

game off. He decided instead to let it run with the wizard’s arm still held up into a starlit sky, like

a promise that he’d come back.

The table had already been set, with their spoons in the mashed potatoes and cornbread

on everyone’s plate. Pete’s mom struck a match and let it sizzle against her cigarette. “Bon

appetit,” she said, blowing smoke from her nose into the pineapple and ham. The fan spread the

smoke around so you couldn’t see it after a second, but Pete still smelled it. His father poured

himself some bourbon and joined them.

After they served themselves, his mother talked about her weekend plans with a friend

named Erica. A yoga studio had opened up in Elmwood, first class free. Pete canted himself so

he wasn’t sitting on the sore spot and caught his mom’s attention. “Maybe we could all go?” she

said.

“I’ve got work,” his father said. They were talking without looking at one another.

“Anyway, don’t you think this falls under ‘nonessential expenditures’?”

“I just said it was free,” she said.

“The first class. You’re not just going to the first class. You’ll get addicted. First it’s

fingernails, then it’s your nose, now it’s your spiritual well-being.”

“Don’t talk about my nose like it’s a bad thing,” she said, hiding her face behind her

hands.

“Goldsmith,” his dad said, tapping his glass on the table. “Don’t cry.”

Pete squirmed. His seat had wooden arms and a metal piece that pushed into the sore

spot. Of course, his parents hadn’t bought nice chairs. They saved their money for stuff like

cigarettes and alcohol. “Can I leave?” he asked. “I’ve got homework.”

“Doesn’t look like you’re finished with dinner,” his father said.

“I am.” Pete got up gingerly. His knees cracked, reminding him that the run through the

mall had been more exercise than he’d gotten in a month.

His mother held her nose with both hands. The cigarette now rolled on the table,

dropping ashes on the placemats.

“Don’t break yourself, kid,” his dad said. “I need you in the yard.”

6

Quickly, he washed off his plate in the sink and slid them into the dishwasher. When he

left the room, he could feel his mother’s eyes following him.

A series of harp plucks and soothing violins welcomed him back. Closing his door, Pete

finally saw his character: an enormous warrior hoisting a mace with his right arm and a sword in

his left. He was in a fight stance wearing gleaming red and silver armor, with blonde hair

flowing all the way down his back. Because of his great strength but low agility, his special

attack was “Phantom,” a target-anyone spell. This was the most accurate representation of how

Pete wanted to look that he had ever seen.

In the first mission, which was training wheels for the game, Pete overwhelmed a castle

guarded by a wizard and recruited their forces. While his gold total scrolled up, his door opened

again. His mom’s hair had fallen out of its bun. She was wincing like when you’re about to be

hit. She sat at the edge of the bed and put her hands in her lap, obviously thinking about what she

was about to say.

Pete had been expecting his parents to divorce for a year now and had exhausted himself

waiting for them to stand up for themselves. He had actually planned to say the first words when

the time came—a speech about how he didn’t care anymore and if it allowed them to be happy,

so be it. But his dad wasn’t here, which seemed odd. Didn’t both of the parents have to break this

news?

“Pete, I need to talk to you about something,” his mom started, and his heart thumped. “I

saw you scratching at dinner, and I think I know what’s going on.”

Pete’s face warmed over. He realized his hand was in his butt as she was talking, and he

tried to nonchalantly pull it out.

“Well, I just thought maybe you might not be wiping enough,” his mom said. Her voice

went up at the end, like it would if you were begging someone. He couldn’t decide how to

respond to this. “Maybe we can get better tissues. Do you miss the double-ply?”

“I’m wiping enough,” he said. “It’s just from a fight in the mall. Don’t worry about it.”

His mother bit her lip. “What does getting in a fight have to do with your butt?”

He could tell what she was thinking. He wanted to respond, but all that came out was

“What?”

“Is that what boys do when they fight?”

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“No, Mom. It was a poke through my clothes.”

“Oh!” she said. “I thought!”

“No.” He picked up the controller and started the game again. He was diving right

through the TV screen and disappearing into it. He was riding a cockatrice over the Zenobian

Mountains and never looking back on this world.

His mother remained on the edge of the bed, chewing on her lip. Then she got up and

hugged him, arms weak. He slid his way out of it. Hanging around her was like nursing a

wounded gazelle on the Serengeti. She needed to worry about herself.

“Do you want me to talk to someone?” she asked.

“No,” he said, pressing the buttons loudly. “It was just a misunderstanding.” He clicked

through several screens and started the next stage. He knew his mom believed in simple

misunderstandings. It was a phrase that calmed her down. She believed anything could be talked

out if it was a misunderstanding and not a fight. That was how her marriage had continued.

“Well, whoever it was, I hate them,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

She watched him for a while and left without saying anything else.

That night, he woke up and saw that his door was open. In the narrow band of light, he

could see his mother crying. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

He spent Sunday raising his levels and Monday checking and re-checking his pants.

During lunchtime, he skipped the cafeteria entirely and sat on a bench in the courtyard he’d

wiped down. That time was dedicated to drawing new Mega Man bosses in his notebook. Blade

Man, with his sword hands, was designed to be a robot chef and went crazy when he couldn’t

open the fridge. Collapse Man went to work every day for an overbearing mustachioed boss,

until the pressure made him snap. To attack, he’d open a briefcase and spill paper on the floor.

Then he’d hide. He’d wait patiently, but attentively. And just as his enemies slipped, he’d jump

down and bed-flop on them. Pete was so satisfied with this character that he spent the rest of the

day in a good mood.

When he got home, the house was quiet. After pouring some cherry syrup into a Coke, he

walked down the hallway. Through his bedroom door, he heard the wizard’s music and a crack

8

of thunder, and when he opened the door, he saw his mom sitting on the floor playing Ogre

Battle. She was still in her pajamas.

“What’s the right answer to who you’d save?” she asked. “Did you say the mother, the

lover, or the child?”

“The child,” he said. “What are you doing?”

She shrugged. “I saw you playing it the other day, and I thought it looked fun.”

“Well, that makes sense,” he mumbled. Was she checking up on him? Wasn’t it enough

that he had to watch them haggle with each other every night? Couldn’t he get one second of

peace?

The screen switched to a battle, and she said, “What do I do?”

“Press the A button to freeze it,” he said.

She looked down at the controller in her hands and said “A” as she pressed the button.

“Now give me the controller.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “I want to fight. How do I do that?” The cursor moved from

“Tarot Card” to “Tactics” to “Retreat.”

“It’ll fight automatically, but make sure you’re targeting the leader,” he said. “This game

is about finding and exploiting the enemy’s weakness.”

“Okay,” she said.

“So go to ‘Tactics’ and click on ‘Leader.’”

She did and then unfroze the game. A tall, tan woman with a braid of crimson-colored

hair trailing down her armor and a sword the size of a pole vault appeared in the fight. She drew

her sword in a quick motion and a shark’s tail of white light sheared through all of the enemies,

who groaned and disappeared. “I killed them!” his mother said, and immediately moved her

troops to enter into another battle. He noticed that she’d named her character “Athena.”

She killed the leader of the next group of enemies and then moved her troops to pick off

the remaining fighters. His mouth fell open as she began storming the stage’s fortress and cutting

down everyone in her path.

“This is what I should do, right?”

“Something like that,” he said.

A 3D image of a barbarian in animal skins filled the screen and begged for a truce. She

said, “It’s probably a trap.” Clicking on “no,” she started the fight and allowed her knights to

9

stab him repeatedly in the chest, rolling down the numbers that represented his health. “You

think I want a truce!” she said.

On the next level, she accidentally used white magic on the skeletons in the Pogrom

Forest—their weakness. With each evaporating skull, she said, “Whoops.”

Pete had to laugh. Maybe he could train her. If she could stand up for herself in the game,

under an assault from sixty Liches, Doll Mages, and Tiger Men, she certainly showed promise.

They took turns playing the game until Pete’s dad came home. He stood in Pete’s

doorway with his jacket over his arm, the other hand massaging his eyes. “Let me guess,” he

asked.

“I felt sick,” his mom said.

“You realize—”

“What do you want me to do if I’m sick?”

His mother winked at Pete.

After his dad left to change his clothes, his mom asked if Pete would promise to play with

her again.

“Anytime,” he said.

“Anytime” ended up being the next day. She woke Pete up early to see if he wanted to

stay home.

“Why?” he asked.

She got a mischievous grin. “You don’t want to go to school, do you?”

“No,” he said. Another day of playing was another opportunity to raise his levels. In

particular, he’d figured out how to make his character do the “Phantom” attack every fight,

filling the battlefield with a legion of radioactively glowing undead. All the character had to do

was raise his red-gloved hand, and shit was on. “But don’t you need to go to work?” Pete asked.

“I’ve got sick time.”

“Don’t you run out of that?”

“Not for a while.”

This was good. She was learning to prioritize. He sat up from bed and said, “I guess.

Sure. I’ll stay home.”

10

For weeks, it went on. Every day they sat in his room in front of the TV and conquered

the dominions of criminals, warlords, and vampires. His mother asked how long the game was,

and Pete said, “At least forty hours. And there are thirteen different endings depending on what

you do in each stage.”

“Oh good!” she said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

She used up all of her sick days, and when she couldn’t skip work anymore, she quit.

That was the day they were experimenting in Dragon’s Haven, a hidden level found by entering

the name “Fireseal.” The enemies were all maxed-out and stayed on their natural terrain, the

parts of the map that gave their attacks added damage. Fighting them was a good way to try new

strategies and combinations of warriors, and Pete had spent hours pairing golems with ice armor,

deploying winged units over deep water, and demanding, with a flourish of his hands, that the

gates of neutral towns be opened. For most of the day, his mom watched, seemingly lost in

thought, until Pete finally trampled over the walls of Albeleo’s castle and handed her the

controller. Leaning back on his bed to unwind with a glass of homemade Cherry Coke, he

watched her begin. She was getting better at attacking. In fact, her strength had tripled since

she’d begun playing. With more training, she’d have both the willpower and the fortitude to

overcome her enemies.

Maybe she could even become the master of her own destiny, as Pete would soon be? He

wondered this when he heard his father’s car settle in the driveway. As he watched his mother

turn the game off, the soreness from the mall returned. He sipped his Coke to hide his

disappointment. “I guess I should make dinner,” she said.

“You could let him cook.”

“And hear about it for the rest of my life?” She ruffled his hair and left, inviting the fight

that was about to come.

Pete heard pieces of the conversation that followed—mostly his mother shouting, “Okay,

okay,” and “Just forget it. Nevermind.” In other words: wussy talk. Pete didn’t want to listen to a

fight with no winners and losers. He closed his door and sat in front of the TV, raising levels.

The fight became background noise. Same old vocabulary: “monetary responsibility” battling

against “Dominique,” as in his mother saying, “Maybe Dominique can hold a job better than I

can.”

11

Then Pete heard his name. He paused the game and heard it again. Something like,

“Nightmare. Pete can’t even hold a conversation with another human being.” It was his dad’s

voice.

“He’s ten,” his mom responded. “He wants to be by himself.”

Pete was leaning against the door now, his heart beating heavily. They sounded far away

enough to be in the kitchen. He opened his door quietly, and the volume increased.

“Maybe that’s what you want?” his dad said. “Alimony?”

“No,” his mom said. “I want time to be depressed without being crucified.”

Pete clenched his teeth. The tears would start any second now. She would bring up

Dominique; he would say, “How many times do I have to apologize?” She would say, “I want

you to feel sorry.” He would say, “Show me what to do, and I’ll do it.” Except he heard his mom

say, “Why are you blaming Pete?”

This was his fault? No no no. Pete opened the hallway closet door and grabbed a red

marker. The ink rolled perfectly on his right fist, but the redness was pinkish and un-

intimidating. It looked like he had held onto a couple of Hot Tamales too long. He tried fixing it

by blacking out the whole hand, but he couldn’t get the color solid. You could see all of the

strokes of the marker, and when he bent his fingers he seemed to be all cut up. Didn’t matter. As

he closed his fist, two tendons lifted up, bringing a fat pitchfork-shaped vein to the surface. He

could have traced its paths up into his hand, branching out like lightning.

He walked into the hall, now ignoring the sound of their pathetic argument. Through their

compromises, they’d given up any semblance of defense and become lumpish, decrepit imps

who prized evasion over vitality. If he could have reigned in his contempt for these chicken-

hearted powerless bards, perhaps he could have gone back into his room and waited to grow up

and move out. But he would not accept his role as the teacher of such a pathetic weakling or as

the son of a man crippled by his own insufficiency.

At precisely the moment he opened the door into the kitchen, he needed to be ready to

attack. He was. They were at the table. Her smoke contaminated most of the air, cloaking Pete

for a second. He held up his right fist, now as black and heavy as a mace, and shouted, “Phantom

attack!”

His mother looked up, eyes widening. His father seemed to be staring at the stack of

napkins in the middle of the table.

12

“Try to hit me,” Pete said. “You can’t do it.”

His parents glanced at one another.

“Especially if you’re giving yourself cancer.” Pete slapped the cigarette out of his

mother’s hand, and it slid across the table.

“Hey,” his mother said. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

For a second, Pete was uncertain how to take this information. He thought she had

betrayed him. After all, she was the one who had failed basic training. She was the one who had

allowed his father to blame their problems on him. Grabbing her by the shirt, Pete tipped her

over until she fell out of the chair. He stood over her while she cried. “What’s wrong with you?”

he asked.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

Pete felt his dad’s hand on his shoulder and swiped it off.

“I believed in you,” he said to his mother.

“You believed in what?” she asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I taught you to be strong.” He looked into her eyes. “In the game, you blew people

away.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” she asked. “Did you think I was going to

attack Bill?”

Pete let her go. “When you were ready to stand up for yourself,” he said.

“Okay, somebody tell me what’s going on,” his father said.

Pete slapped him.

His father righted himself and touched his face. He made a strange shape with his mouth

and laughed softly, as if he’d just heard a joke. Kneeling down, he showed Pete the size of his

fist by pressing it against his son’s cheek. Ring and knuckle burrowed into the grooves of the

boy’s teeth. “If you’re trying to hurt me,” he said, “that’s not going to do it.”

The look in his father’s eyes made Pete feel faint, pinned. He could smell the whiskey on

the old man’s breath.

“Now why don’t you tell me what you mean by ‘Phantom attack’?”

“It’s from the game,” his mother said. “It’s the thing the little guy does. The guy with a

woman’s head of hair.”

“No,” Pete said. He felt his skin shriveling and disintegrating.

13

“Is that who I’m meeting?” his father asked. “Is that the person who possessed my son?”

“No,” Pete said.

“Come on,” his father said, as if disappointed. “I want to know what that game has been

telling you!” He grabbed Pete and shook him.

Pete couldn’t get away. His father’s finger-bones flattened his biceps, spreading the pain

down his arms and into his chest. It wasn’t until his father let go that Pete could run for the door.

He had failed again. But what could he do now but run? He might as well have dirtied his pants.

He was so disgusted with himself.

Before he cut down the driveway, he heard his mom yell his name and stopped—just

long enough to hear his father say, “You said he needs to be by himself. Let him go.”

He watched the door close. He wasn’t even important enough to chase.

The night was crowded with screeching cicadas, all buckling their innards to make the

sound of someone’s skin being stripped away. The first time he’d heard it this season. No doubt

tomorrow the sidewalks would be lined with their husks, some crunched underfoot. He thought

about the bullies, though he didn’t hurt anymore. About the monster truck racing shirt, that it was

a picture of a real thing with real power. He thought about the tall one’s face, the way he

squinted and asked, “Don’t you understand English?”

Pete held himself in the cold. The blackened hand he’d slapped his father with stung and

shook. He’d have to wash it somewhere. He’d have to find a place to sleep. And then what? His

parents would never accept him back. He’d told his mother she disappointed him. He couldn’t

have summoned an antlion with this fist.

Behind him, a light came on. His parents stood in the living room window, divided into

two panes. But they didn’t move to stop him. They were staring, their faces stricken and guilty.

His mother covered her left ear where she’d fallen, and Pete rubbed the indentation from his

father’s ring. Noticing the shared gesture, Pete felt all of his shame gather into one place in his

stomach, a hot burning sensation. He felt the burden of his imaginary armor fall away. Until that

moment, he’d never imagined he could be so fragile.

14

LET ME LAY A TRUTH BOMB ON YOU

So last night I was playing Sim City on Super Nintendo, trying to make my citizens happy

by building new roads, when all of a sudden a trombone blurted out a series of descending notes

and my screen turned red. It was happening again. Just a few miles south of my city, a green,

Godzilla-like monster appeared and started swimming up the river that cut through my CBD, and

I thought, “It’s over.”

As a courtesy, the game asked me what I wanted to do. I knew there was nothing I could

do. I went through the menu to see if an option had opened up to fire nukes or drop bombs from

my helicopters. But no. That’d be too easy. So I went through the routine. I built residential

zones on a peninsula at the opposite end of the map to try to draw him away. As usual, he didn’t

stray one millimeter from his course. Then I tried destroying the town myself, to deny him the

satisfaction. But he made landfall too quickly and smashed right through the heart of my power

grid. Left in a blackout with fires erupting around the city, my citizens took to the streets. They

were pummeled underfoot. Within minutes, half of Dwightopolis was destroyed. He derailed my

train. He sunk my passenger cruise liner. He stepped so hard on my football stadium it exploded.

And then he was gone, disappeared off the edge of the screen, unfazed by the ongoing

detonations and traffic jams in the smoldering ruins behind him, and maybe even smiling.

Here’s where it gets weird. I went to bed. I woke up today in the afternoon. I went to see

a movie. And when I got home, half my real neighborhood was destroyed. Houses had splintered

into thousands of pieces and been flattened into the ground. Cars were upturned and wedged into

centuries-old live oak trees. Electrical wires hissed in the puddles. And the mud clods in my yard

bubbled and smelled like brontosaurus shit.

How could this have happened? That’s the question. And then I remembered something

my mom always told me. She always said, “Baby, I saw it on TV.” That was how she knew

something was true. And my flattened house was undeniably true.

But let’s stop for a second. You probably think I’m crazy. You probably think a tornado

just sprung up from nowhere and tore apart my house, or old Mrs. Gilleyon finally made good on

her promise to send me to hell. But the weather was peaceful that day, and Mrs. Gilleyon was at

the movie theater. I saw her at the concession stand arguing over the price of Twizzlers.

15

Here’s what I think. Maybe you remember an early nineties cartoon series called Captain

N: The Nintendo Master, a show in which Kevin Keene, a teenager from Los Angeles, and his

dog Duke are sucked into Videoland through his TV while he’s playing Mike Tyson’s Punch

Out? That show hypothesizes there are ways to get in, and why is it so crazy to think there are

ways to get out, too? Or think about Tron, Steven Lisberger’s masterpiece about a young Jeff

Bridges getting digitized into a rogue computer program via a state-of-the-art laser. That movie

became a cult classic. Why? Because it touched on something that everyone feels. Why?

Because we believe there’s gotta be another reality. Think about Last Action Hero, in which a

boy is transported into the movies, or the Neverending Story, where Bastian Balthazar Bux must

cross over into a novel to meet the child-like Empress and save Fantasia. Granted, those aren’t

great movies, but why does this idea of traveling into fictional worlds keep coming up? The

Matrix, Avatar, Amazon Women on the Moon, Weird Science, Labyrinth, Pleasantville, The

Truman Show, Treehouse of Horrors IX, “The Kugelmass Episode.” We even do this to

ourselves with Second Life and World of Warcraft.

This isn’t a novel idea. In fact, it’s a cliché of science fiction and fantasy, and that just

proves my point. Because you know what’s true about clichés? They’re clichés because they’re

based on truth. That’s something else my mom taught me.

She wouldn’t have words for this, though. Who could? One minute your house stands.

The next, it’s gone. When I returned from the movie, I walked into what used to be my living

room and stood on the circular ceramic plate that had been on my ceiling, and I felt the earth

sinking under my weight. All of that mud diffusing around me, sucking me down like The Birth

of Venus played in reverse. I sat and looked at my neighborhood and cars drove by, but no one

stopped. I didn’t blame them. They had their own shit.

When I started college, I chose this house because the neighborhood was full of old

people, and I had the idea that they could teach me something about gardening or cooking or

longevity. I tried walking like they do, with my hands bunched up around my waist line, and I

wore white sneakers and windbreakers. I tried to make friends. Then my roommate got stabbed

on his way to a bar. He was walking down Freret Street with a hamburger in his hands, and three

Latino frat boys stabbed him in the stomach and ran off, not even taking his wallet. I rationalized

that it was night time, and I only went out walking during the day, so I should be fine. Then my

next-door neighbor Billy ran into the street one afternoon holding a steak knife in the air. His

16

eyes were crazy and he was bleeding from his mouth and he started dragging the knife across his

forearm, screaming, “Is that what you want?” to a blonde woman smoking a cigarette on the

porch. Later, I found out they had just broken up. “I thought this was a safe neighborhood,” I told

the cops.

“It is,” they said.

I don’t blame anyone for not stopping their cars. I started staying indoors. That’s when I

began playing old video games. I’d invite people over, but they didn’t want to play with me

because I was jaundiced and rail-thin. I didn’t even notice. I just thought people were mean until

I called my mother to complain and at one point mentioned that my whole body was itching.

When she came over she screamed and brought me to the hospital. The doctors ran blood tests

for weeks and decided I had something called pseudo-auto-immune hepatitis caused by an

allergic reaction to my acne medication. I recovered within days, but my face broke out, and I

couldn’t stop crying. My mother couldn’t keep up the fight, and when her diabetes took hold, she

died in a matter of months. My only friends left were two fat, ugly, forty-year-old lesbians who

got tired of listening to me cry. They left me, too.

Everything I just said is true, although sometimes I doubt it. As I get older, it’s hard to

remember how I felt when these things happened, how I could have written the things in my

journal that I did. How I could have distanced myself from so many people. Maybe my mother

didn’t die. Maybe she got tired of me and simply stopped calling, and one day she’ll return.

That’s why I keep her jewelry box—just in case. It can be hard to know what’s real and what’s

willed. But if you take a look at my house, if you walk up the crumbling red brick steps and run

your hand on my old blue banister and look through what used to be a wall into my living room

at the remains of my television and the rosewood bar my grandmother willed to me and the

rolling chair for the table and the spongy drywall and the ceramic embellishment I’m sitting

on—you’ll know anything’s possible.

People have started asking me my name and other questions over the last few hours. It’s

funny to think they ignored me, yet each had an internal timer for how long they’d wait until

they had to say something. One man wanted to know if I needed help, and I said, “No.” I told

him I needed an explanation.

17

PROMENADE

On a hot April evening, he’d come walking down the street in a powder blue suit and top

hat holding an Amazon woman to his arm. Arthur Doleman, the biggest nerd in our senior class,

with a vice grip on a six-foot-tall goddess sewn into a red dress like Jessica Rabbit. His hair

would be tousled, a little sign of the limo ride’s backseat activities, and as he walked into the

gymnasium his eyes would meet mine and show confidence and gratitude. Following them, I’d

return to the prom from my cigarette break, nod at the people whose mouths hung open at the

new guest, and say, “I did it.” Not for money or cruelty or pity—I saved Arthur Doleman

because he deserved it, and it made me happy.

From the beginning, Arthur had other plans. The day I encouraged him to go to the prom,

he told me he couldn’t. In a robot voice. He told me he only copulated with mechanical beings.

“I think I know what you mean,” I said. Put me in that situation any year before I was a

senior and I would have made fun of him loud enough for others to hear. But two things had

happened recently. First, I’d been fighting with my girlfriend, Brittany, who liked to turn

conversations about our weekend plans into declarations of allegiance. If I was doing something

without her, I was against her. You know how teenagers can be. Second, Arthur had worked for

me during my SGA President campaign, and one night while we were printing flyers, he had

asked if we were primarily neighbors or friends. Arthur’s father kept most people from coming

within a hundred feet of his house. I gave him the nice answer. Now I wanted him to scratch my

back. We had onlookers. “Listen, can you drop the routine?” I asked.

“Negatory.”

“Do you want me to find you a date?”

“I have a date,” he said. “A date with Destiny.” He pulled out a playing card with a

picture of an elf-woman in knee-high boots, green tights, and a metallic bra. Tendrils of fire

wrapped around her staff and pulsed in the air, creating a halo around the tip.

I was so surprised I was speechless. I couldn’t believe anyone would make such a lame

joke, unless they were six or slow. It was the kind of thing that would make most people consider

him a lost cause. But it was important to me to see him at prom. I had lived next to Arthur my

whole life, and I knew what his father was like. It’s hard to get a date when your dad has shown

up in the paper twice for indecent exposure, and once for fondling a nativity scene goat at the

18

public park. He claimed he was removing ticks from the goat’s fur like a mother gorilla does to

her son.

I told Arthur to think about it.

He said he couldn’t think. Only compute.

“Okay,” I said. “Then compute it.”

A few days later, I went next door to his house and told Jack D about the prom. I thought

I could use him. Any man who’d rock a white beard, tinted glasses, and a knit beanie that fluffed

at the top like the tip of a condom would understand the benefits of getting a girl drunk and

taking her out after a dance. He told me Arthur wouldn’t go because he wasn’t interested in

pussy.

“What about the girl that used to come over here?” I asked.

He avoided the question. “Maybe you could bring your girlfriend over here.” He

scratched his thigh as he said it and smiled at me in a way that was unnerving.

“Maybe,” I said. “But probably not.”

When prom was three weeks away, I called Arthur and told him he deserved to get out of

the house with his dad for one night. “He’s killing you,” I said. “He practically runs to the door

to scare people off.” I was looking out my window and watching Jack D search through my

parents’ mailbox by the street. He was pulling the envelopes out one at a time and holding them

up to the sunlight, looking for cash. “He said he wants me to bring my girlfriend over to him.”

“That’s his way of joking,” Arthur said, dropping the robot voice. “I like my dad.”

“I like him, too,” I said. “In the way I like Jack Nicholson characters. But I don’t want

them for fathers.”

“He wasn’t that bad in Mars Attacks,” Arthur said. “He showed real tenderness after

finding out that the French president had been killed.”

I opened my tennis ball cage and grabbed a ball. Standing at the window again, I lobbed

it towards Jack D so that it bounced by him. He turned around and waved. “Either way. I’m

taking you to the Jukebox Diner and we’re going to look at pictures and rank your options.”

“That’s objectifying,” Arthur said.

“Exactly.”

“I’m not into that.”

19

“Arthur,” I said, turning to see that he was at his window, too, looking at me. “What do

you think you’re doing with the Destiny card? You know what the real thing is like.”

He stayed silent for a while, then said, “Okay.” Everyone thought Arthur was a virgin,

but I knew he wasn’t. He had a girlfriend for a couple months who did everything with him.

Crazy stuff I didn’t think real people tried. She had no qualms about an open window, and, while

I wasn’t ecstatic to be listening, I couldn’t help but smile and say, “Damn. Go Arthur.” Then I

realized Jack D was at his window, too. He might have even been holding a microphone, leaning

into the open air to get a recording. It was his ADHD. Whenever Jack was in the newspapers, a

reporter would ask why he had run through the mall naked or fondled a goat or x, y, or z. Once,

he answered, “I have ADHD.”

The reporter responded, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I can’t concentrate on what’s right and wrong anymore,” he said. “I’m genetically pre-

disposed to perversion.” That became a sidebar for the article, and you got the feeling there was

a lot more that didn’t make it out into public. Arthur’s girlfriend stopped coming after awhile.

One can only speculate why.

When we got to the Jukebox, I ordered us some sliders and coffee and spread out a

yearbook from Ursuline, Brittany’s all-girls Catholic school. I chose Ursuline not only because

the girls’ numbers were easy to get from Brittany, but also because the nuns who ran the school

kept strict rules over the girls, which had an inverse effect on their dedication to moral principles.

Also, they were hot—hotter per capita than the girls at any other school in the area.

I pointed out one or two that I had in mind, and Arthur waffled about what he thought.

But after I saw him take interest in some, I got a sense of his style. He liked redheads with long

hair and dark tans and good grades. He also liked guessing about each of them. With the index,

we’d flip through the book and see what clubs they belonged to, and he’d get a faraway look in

his eyes when I told him about a membership in the creative writing club, or the theatre troupe,

or the mathletes. I told him he could pick anyone he wanted. Brittany knew everybody. And by

the end of the meal, we had narrowed the list down to ten. I got Brittany on the phone to vet

each, and that list became five.

20

I told her Arthur was still looking for a date because he’d recently broken up with his

girlfriend, and he had seen these girls in the yearbook and wanted to know if any of them were

available.

Brittany said she’d look into it, and I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have one at the prom

with you so you don’t have to stick with me all night?” I was joking.

Brittany said, “I wasn’t going to stick with you all night anyway, with all of those hot

guys gathered in one place.”

Arthur overheard her and started laughing. “I’m sure you’ll do very well for yourself,” I

said into the receiver. Then I thanked her for the help, and when she hung up, I told Arthur the

situation. The plan was to wait to hear back, and move forward with his first choice of the girls

who were available. Although I didn’t mention it, the plan was also to not advertise that he liked

to talk in a robot voice. That was just about the worst thing I could imagine happening.

In retrospect, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that a girl would turn down Arthur,

regardless of his reputation, physical shortcomings, and unbelievable nerdiness. He had a sweet

side I assumed any girl would see. Superficiality was the province of guys hanging out in locker

rooms—and I guess diners—ranking people and boasting about whatever it was they could boast

about. If they had a small dick, they talked about their muscles. If they had no muscles, they

talked about their dick. If they had a small dick and no muscles, they stayed out of the

conversation and worked on getting one of those things. I suspected Arthur had an advantage by

not thinking that way. I suspected women were more insightful than us and would choose the

charming underdog who’d miss a beat here or there but be as loyal as a dog. Like I said, when I

was in high school, I was stupid.

I missed the daily updates on Arthur’s calls to each woman because I was busy with

booking prom and acting as a go-between for the principal and the SGA, on top of schoolwork

and fights with Brittany. But I could see people picking him up in the evenings, and I’d hear

from my parents that Jack was out and about in the neighborhood later than usual, seemingly

looking for something to do. I guess it was a stressful time in all of our lives with my parents

waiting to hear back on my college applications and funding, and me planning a party for

everyone I knew, and Arthur trying to figure out a way to encourage someone to like him.

Brittany suggested that Arthur’s picks were really my own, and it became increasingly obvious

21

we wouldn’t stay together after high school, like we planned. That was all right with me as long

as it was peaceable, although I’m sure I did things to ensure it wouldn’t be.

When the time came, Arthur chose Lisa, who I later found was the only one left. He came

over to my house, and we sat in my bedroom and shot plastic basketballs into a small net over

my bed while he shared the details. He said she said he was nice. She also, apparently, reminded

him of his last girlfriend.

I asked him what they had talked about on the phone, and he said how awkward it was

for him to be calling her without having met her. She said, “Well, let’s fix that.”

“Damn,” I said. “You’re the man.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Apparently, the meeting didn’t just go well. It went great. Arthur didn’t want to say too

much, but they talked about school and life and their plans for college and favorite bands and

movies and she was laughing.

I was shocked. I couldn’t help it. I slapped him on the shoulder and said, “You did it.” As

much as I believed in the sweet side and all of that crap you see in movies, I assumed Arthur

would get nervous face to face and make a Dungeons & Dragons reference or talk about the pros

and cons of the first generation Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles versus the second and drive each

girl off. I thought keeping him from meeting his date until prom night was the best strategy. “Is

she into Magic?” I asked.

He seemed offended. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I just want to get a bone on.”

That was when I realized he was smarter than he looked.

Prom was on a Friday. A light rain had started the night before, and when the heat set in,

steam rose off Gause Boulevard, the main artery down the center of town, like it was on fire. I

stood at my window and watched how fast people were driving. Parents going to pick up rented

tuxedos and boutonnières and finger sandwich plates, coming back to drop off supplies and go

out again on more errands at the demand of each of us, launching and returning as if on a fixed

orbit. At the time, I felt proud that I had played a large role in orchestrating this, or at least

setting it into motion. While my dad dusted off my jacket, my mom took pictures of me standing

in my bedroom and I talked about how satisfied I was just to be able to look next door and see

the light on.

22

As I said this, my mom peered over my shoulder and made a puzzled face. “That’s an

interesting suit he’s got,” she said.

Arthur passed by the window, and I got a glimpse of a dark green jacket with gold

buttons and a yellow-and-green patch on his shoulder—one of those arrow-like symbols that

show your rank in the army.

My dad patted me on the shoulder like my dog had just died.

“I did what I could,” I said. “It’s up to him now.” And we got back to pictures.

The limo arrived and I gave the driver directions to Brittany’s house, and as we pulled

away I saw Jack D sitting on the first floor listening to the radio. That was good. At least, he

might not hear the doorbell ring and make things worse. When we got to her house, Brittany

came outside in her fuchsia dress and rolled her eyes as her parents said something. I got out and

her parents took pictures while she pinned the orchid boutonnière onto me and patted the flower

to see if it’d fall, and then as I put her corsage on her wrist, which she smiled at half-heartedly.

She looked tired, which I didn’t say. Instead, I took her to dinner at an Italian restaurant and

filled up with pasta and got sleepy myself. By the time we got to the gymnasium, our principal

was dancing and the room was filled with bodies. I scanned the crowd for Arthur and didn’t see

him, but I didn’t have much of a chance because my buddy from SGA came up and pointed out

that the balloons attached to the tables were the wrong color and the banner announcing the

theme of the night was hung too high to read. It was supposed to say, “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”

I told him it was too late to worry about that stuff and to enjoy himself, which is what I

did. Brittany and I danced and ate hors d’oeuvres and sweated at the tables and drank water and

went back out there every time we heard a song we recognized. The music was a live band made

up of juniors and sophomores, and they kept things moving with a mix of 80s songs and our own

stuff. After a little while, I took off my shoes and slid around on the dance floor, and Brittany did

this skirt ruffle move from Grease and jumped around. It would have been so easy to stop

looking for Arthur. I couldn’t, though. Walking around the room, I checked every corner. Then,

with only a few minutes left before the doors closed, I asked Brittany if she had Lisa’s phone

number.

“Yeah. But why?” she asked.

“I’m wondering where they’re at. Time’s running out.”

23

“They’re probably eating dinner.” She arched her eyebrows and smiled. “Maybe they’re

doing it.”

“You think?” I asked. I got an image of Arthur in that military jacket barking orders to a

girl in latex. The image was ruined, though, when I put Jack D at the other end of the bed,

wearing his beanie.

“Nah. Not with that kid,” Brittany said. She started back towards the dance floor, and I

stopped her.

“So can I use your phone?”

“Why?” she asked. She looked in my eyes. “If he’s done something—”

“I’m just nervous. It’s probably nothing.”

She pushed her phone into my chest. “Just get it over with,” she said. “If you’re not back

on the dance floor in ten minutes, I’ll be dancing with somebody else.”

I found Lisa’s number and dialed. I watched Brittany put her hands in the air and slide

into a group of her friends, who were all doing the same hands-up, pouty lip dance. She was

serious about finding another guy.

The phone went to voice mail, and so I called Arthur’s phone next. Nothing. His voice

mail went to a cartoon theme song, and though I almost felt too embarrassed to wait it out and

leave a message, I got to the beep and said he needed to get over here quick if he was coming.

When I finished, I looked around and realized I was standing in a crowd of people I didn’t

recognize. I tried not to let my nerves got a hold of me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that

something awful had happened.

I found Brittany in the middle of the dance floor and handed her back the phone.

“Nothing,” I said. She didn’t stop dancing, and neither did her friends. One got in my face and

shouted, “Less talking, more dancing.” And the rest of them whooped. I waited until Brittany

acknowledged me.

“If it’s bothering you so much, go,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “But it’s probably stupid.”

“I know,” she said. “But you’re not enjoying your own party. So go.”

“Well, what about you?”

“I can’t think about it,” she said. “If I get worried, I’ll cry. Even if everything’s okay.” I

frowned at her. “It’s called self preservation,” she said.

24

This was not going to be my wife.

I told the principal I had an emergency and to go on without me, and I got a cab ride back

home. The entire drive I was thinking, “It’s probably fine.” And I started to daydream about how

mad Arthur would be that I had shown up while he was getting it on. I was his asshole neighbor

and why did I even care that much? It’s not like we were friends. It’s not like he was friends with

anyone. He was always the kind of kid who survived, like Brittany, I guess. He took care of

himself. He didn’t need a savior. And that’s what I’d always wanted to be. My whole thing was

some stupid self-gratifying hero act. I was an idiot. I opened the window to the cab and breathed

in some fresh air.

Then I got to his house. The door was open and there were tire tracks through the grass. I

ran out the taxi without paying the driver and walked in the house and Jack D was lying bloodied

in the doorway. “Where’s Arthur?” I said.

His eyes were closed. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

The official police explanation was that there’d been a domestic struggle, a son beating

his father up for scaring away a date and then going on the run. Lisa couldn’t confirm any of this,

but she did say Jack D held her shoulders and scared her. She wasn’t comfortable picking up

Arthur in the first place, having read about his father in the paper, and she didn’t know what had

happened during the fight because when Jack grabbed her, she fled the scene. Jack, of course,

didn’t necessarily remember what had happened either and said it was always like this. When a

reporter asked him what he meant, he said, “I’m always the victim. It’s society misunderstanding

me.”

I told the cop I didn’t think Arthur had it in him, and I wouldn’t put it past Jack D to beat

himself up. Then he could guilt Arthur to come back. “If that was his plan,” the cop said, “he’d

be waiting a long time for somebody to notice him.”

I called Brittany on my way to the police station and told her what had happened. She

didn’t want to talk to me. Somehow this was my fault. Watching her slip into a crowd in a

fuchsia dress at prom while her friends did their goofy dance together was the last time I’d see

her, though I didn’t know it at the time. Within a week, she called to break up with me, and I

brought out every nasty thing I could think of to end our time together in hellfire. And she said I

25

was friends with a fugitive, and I should follow his line down Gause Boulevard and onto the

interstate and never come back.

Arthur, you see, hadn’t high-tailed it out of Slidell right after the incident. No one knows

why, but he went to the Jukebox diner and bought himself dinner first. The waitresses all

confirmed there was a teenager in a military uniform there about seven o’clock that night. He

was very nice, left a large tip, and wiped his table before leaving. When he drove off, everyone

heard the boom of him hitting a fence. Onlookers from the street saw it, too. He pulled onto

Gause headed towards the interstate, accelerated over a curb and into a metal fence, rammed it,

slowed, and rammed it again, and then pulled back onto the road dragging a fence post

underneath him, shooting up sparks and leaving a scar down the right lane. It was him, they all

swore. It was Arthur, and he was smiling.

Years have gone by since then and no one has yet to find an answer for what was going

on at that house, though many have theories. Some say Arthur was as crazy as his father, or

secretly on drugs, or breaking through with schizophrenia. Others think he was trying to kill

himself by crashing into the fence, or was just scratching his dad’s car as a final “fuck you,” or

was seeing if he had the balls to drive into something. Still others think he must have been

abused and that Lisa had been a kind of offering to his father and suddenly he’d had a moment of

clarity that this was wrong. Some claimed he was a Scientologist, as if that explained anything.

Some say, “You don’t beat up your daddy and run away. That makes you a coward.” Arthur

would probably be okay with that.

This was small town life, showing its smallness as the year went by and we remained

obsessed. You should know it was 1997. Everyone felt like time was running out. With Dolly the

cloned sheep walking around and the Heaven’s Gate cult beaming up and Y2K looming, we

were, according to popular opinion, in end times. And as we repeatedly watched a three-hour

movie about a giant ship sinking, we all understood the motivation to escape while you could.

However, there was one person who didn’t talk about Arthur Doleman leaving, only

listened to the stories, and from time to time I visited with him. I told him it was my fault Arthur

left because I had never been a friend to him, and he said, “That’s a fucked up way of saying you

control him. Maybe you’re just jealous.” And he was right. Jack had a lot of impromptu insight

that didn’t seem worth anything at first because it came from a crazy man. Once, he told me,

26

“Girls have to have sex with you on prom night because ‘prom’ is half of ‘promise.’” And, after

looking around the room to see if he was even talking to me, I said, “I think it’s short for

‘promenade.’”

“They both work,” he said.

I wanted to hug him.

Within a month of prom, I got the final letter saying I hadn’t been funded enough to go to

college. By then the town was emptying out. I got a job at a local water bottling plant and stayed

close to my parents’ neighborhood and Jack D. Sometimes, I still like to stand in Arthur’s

bedroom, amongst the posters of dragons and cut-outs of robots and magazines about elves and

books upon books set in space, and look through his window at my house, at its bareness and

fragility. Sometimes, I’ll even see my mother walking through the kitchen, and I’ll throw open

the windows and shout, “Look up here,” and she’ll wave and hold up her wrist and tap her

watch, and I’ll realize yet again that I’ve lost several hours simply by talking and need to jump in

the car to make an appointment for which I’m already late.

27

SURVIVOR

To train for Survivor, we were living on the levee in a clutch of pin oaks without

anyone’s help. Douglas and I had been running through our supplies for the last week at an

embarrassingly fast pace and were down to a small collection of cheap beer, potted meats, and

Van Halen albums. Plus, Percocet, which kept us from spending too much time thinking. Today

we would head to Los Angeles for the final round of auditions, and even though I swore off my

parents when they wouldn’t give us money, I refused to take the car they needed to buy my

mom’s pain killers.

As a back-up plan, Douglas wanted to steal Ash’s old Impala. I had seen that car top off

at twenty miles an hour and go puttering down the street spewing black puffs of smoke. Also,

Ash used to be a football player, famous for throwing his helmet at a fan and breaking the man’s

teeth. If he saw us pushing his car down the driveway, we could end up floating in the lake.

“There’s gotta be something else,” I said.

“You’re right,” Douglas said. “Our feet.”

We went at first daylight. Ash lived out in a plot of undeveloped land a mile or so from

my parents’ house in a yellow brick one-story with a Spanish-style courtyard that held the envy

of the area: a decrepit, scum-lined fountain that lit up when it was flowing. We broke into his

garage, which smelled like cat piss and paint thinner, and when I opened his car door a head

wearing a cowboy hat fell out. A crank radio in the passenger seat was playing “Running with

the Devil.”

“He’s drunk,” Douglas said, hitting him with the hat. “And he got some last night.”

Douglas held up a pink bra with an exposed wire. “It looks like your Mom’s.”

Ash twitched.

“Let’s get going with this,” I said. He was a big man, big enough to eat us, and we had a

few more stops before we could hit the interstate.

Ash’s bedroom was through a door and down a wood-paneled hallway. He opened his

eyes at me, but he wasn’t seeing anything. Douglas picked up a red snap case embossed with

“JA” that fell out his shirt. It was filled with tiny translucent crystals, each just bigger than a

grain of sand. “PCP,” I said. “The old man has taste.” We finished dragging him to his bedroom,

28

which smelled like body spray and sauna water, and laid his head against the nightstand. The air

was heavy and close, and before Douglas could fuck around some more I said we should go.

I found the keys in the ignition, although we probably didn’t need them—the switch

could turn 180 degrees on its own. I decided next would be my parents’ house. Douglas held up

the snap case to the light and watched the crystals sparkle. “Let’s try some,” he said.

“We shouldn’t even bring it,” I said. “What do we need it for?”

“You never know,” he said, sprinkling them back into the snap case with this thumb and

forefinger. “Maybe you could cut glass with one. You didn’t think about that, did you?”

I threw the car into reverse and pointed us south. “Why would we need to cut glass?

Where would there even be glass on a deserted island?” I wasn’t afraid of the drugs. I can handle

taking ten hits of acid without getting paranoid. I’ve taken acid and DXM, which is about as

intense a mix as it gets.

“It’s about expecting the unexpected,” Douglas said. “We need to practice being

resourceful.” With that, he started rolling a joint. “Besides, going to your parents’ house is

depressing.”

We put a line of the PCP in the joint and smoked it as we were driving. I had never had it

before and was waiting for something special to happen. Sure enough, the cherry took on a crazy

green hue and popped every once in a while as the joint burned down. We left Ash’s property

and settled against the lee slope of the levee where we could smoke in peace. I put my sunglasses

on because the sunlight was blinding. After the storm a few years back, the trees had thinned out,

grayed over, been cut down, or fallen, leaving nothing between our heads and the sky. The heat

was vicious in the summer now. In fact, part of our pitch to the Survivor casting directors was

that we’d donate all our money from the show to local charities, maybe even to help grow some

trees. I guess they believed us, because we got our letter to come to L.A. maybe three weeks after

we sent in our video.

When the paper burnt up, the crystals fell into our hands. They were tan-colored and

brown-tipped, almost like slightly burnt toast.

“I guess they’re too big,” Douglas said and popped them into his mouth.

I did the same. We finished the joint, sweating in silence, then driving again past rows

and rows of fading swaybacked shotguns, looking sorry and vacant.

29

My parents lived in a slightly nicer neighborhood that had been recently overrun with

raccoons. The locals had contacted animal and pest control several times to do something but

without success, leading to several murders within the neighborhood cat population. A war was

being fought between the humans and the raccoons now. We lived in a bird sanctuary, but you

could hear small-arms fire all day going into the trees and scalping the tops of fences where the

coons liked to stay. When we arrived, there were intestines in the middle of the road. The coons

had sliced down one cat’s belly and torn up its face so bad all I could make out was a tongue and

an eye socket. Ten or eleven of the coons sat on fence posts, tree limbs, and under eaves

watching us. My eyes never left their hands.

We walked into my parents’ house through the kitchen, which was separated from the

living room by the stove countertop. My mother was on the love seat, smoking a cigarette and

watching TV. She was wearing a dirty white blouse and a gold chain and had her legs up on the

glass coffee table. I could see her yellow toenails tapping against a mug. I opened the kitchen

cabinets and started lining up cereal boxes.

“How was your night on the levee?” my mom asked. “Did you wipe your ass with a

leaf?”

“We didn’t wipe, Mrs. Coniglio,” Douglas said. “Grin and bear it.”

“Oh, Douglas. I didn’t notice you here,” she said, sitting up. “Let me ask you: why go on

the show as a team? I’ve asked him but he doesn’t have an answer. Seems like it would pit you

against one another.”

“The real question,” I said, “is why you pretend to care.”

“I don’t want to see my son embarrassed on national television,” she said. “You should

try Wheel of Fortune instead.”

A growl rattled from somewhere in the room. We looked around, and Douglas and I kept

taking boxes out of the cabinets. “Wheel of Fortune requires you to know something,” I said.

“So does Survivor,” she said. “You have to know how to do stuff, like build houses.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “Every season, the people who are great and who

everybody likes are taken down by the mediocre contestants, and then it turns into a popularity

contest.” Douglas smiled while I talked. We had already had this conversation. “We’ll win

because we can lie through our teeth.”

“You mean one of you will win,” she said.

30

“And then we’ll split the money.”

“I think you’re making a huge mistake. And by the way, honey, you look terrible. Why

don’t you come back home?”

The rattling growl happened again. Douglas’ pupils tightened. “We’ve got all we need,”

he said. He walked over to my parents’ fireplace and took out the poker. “I’ll take care of this,

too.” A raccoon darted out from behind the couch and bolted over the counter, slamming into the

door. Realizing it was cornered, it turned and faced off with Douglas, who held the poker above

his head. He pinned it with the poker by the scruff of its neck and slid it into the kitchen while it

flailed, leaving enough room for the door to open. “I’ll give it a sporting chance,” he said, and let

it go. After it scrambled outside, my mother and I followed Douglas onto the driveway and

watched him launch the poker something like twenty feet where it landed onto the raccoon’s

spine in mid-stride. The coon screamed as its back broke, and it trembled when Douglas put his

foot down on its neck, removed a knife from his belt, and made it bleed. Douglas stepped in the

blood as he brought the raccoon’s carcass to the middle of the road, next to the dead cat, and

dropped it in a pile, then wiped his hands off on his shirt.

“He could win,” my mom said.

My stomach was turning when I got back in the car. I couldn’t figure out why my mom

couldn’t support me. She had been thrown off a horse a year ago and broken her back, and she

didn’t get around much anymore, just from the living room to the driveway. She needed

painkillers to breathe sometimes—that was where we got the Percocet from. You’d think she’d

have sympathy for her son when he tried to do something with his life. To get out of this

miserable place and go to California, where they had women you weren’t related to and food

from faraway places and people who stood in front of cameras for a living without having to take

their clothes off. I drove us out of there and said, “Can you believe her?”

“Wheel of Fortune,” Douglas said.

“I know, right?”

Douglas put another line of PCP in the joint, saying some of these crystals looked smaller

than the other ones and might burn more easily. We had to go to my girlfriend’s house next, but

she wouldn’t mind if we were blazing. It might even help. Her name was Christy. She had

gorgeous brown curly hair that went down her back almost past her waist, and she treated me

31

like I was the greatest lover in the whole world. I had promised her we’d be back after the show

to rescue her, but Douglas always followed that up with lines like, “If we can,” that made me not

want to bring it up anymore. If I couldn’t come back for Christy, I almost didn’t want to go in the

first place.

We had to swallow the crystals again, and I ate the peanut after we were done with the

joint. We pulled into Christy’s driveway blood-eyed and tired, and Douglas said he’d stay in the

car, which I said I appreciated. Christy’s parents didn’t appear to be home, and I didn’t know

what would happen inside. Her red door looked like a wide berth into Hell.

I touched the doorbell and leaned against the brick entryway. I must have smelled like a

Grateful Dead concert. When she opened the door, she shook her head. “You think this is a good

idea before you hit the road?”

“Necessary armament,” I said and walked inside. Her parents had a nice open front room

with a lot of windows. It made them seem richer than they actually were. Christy’s dad was an

army guy and her mom was a nurse, and they’d done a lot of moving around. That’s how I knew

she would come with me. She was used to packing up and leaving.

I asked how her classes were going, and she said she got an “A” in chemistry. “I’m so

proud,” I said. She was enrolled at the community college, and barring a disaster she would be

the first person I knew with a college degree.

“Do you want a soda?” she asked me.

“I can’t take anything heavy.” I knew she wanted to do some GHB and pass out for a

while, and as nice as that sounded, I couldn’t leave Douglas just sitting in the car for four more

hours.

“I know how to mix it now.” She laughed. “I’m like a real chemist.”

“Still.” I fell onto the couch. It wouldn’t have taken much to put me to sleep, although my

stomach was still churning. “Do you know what my mom said?” I asked, as Christy made herself

a drink. “She said I didn’t stand a chance on the show. We haven’t even made it through the final

round of auditions, and she was trying to get under my skin.”

“You’ll make the show,” Christy said, licking her stirrer. “And you’ll win. She’s just

being a bitch.”

“Hey,” I said, sitting up. “That’s my mom. You know she’s hurting. Those painkillers

mess her up.”

32

Christy rolled her eyes. “She was always a bitch. She never liked me, and she never

supported you.”

I hugged a pillow and fell back into the cushions. “Maybe she’s jealous. Maybe she hates

me. Maybe she just doesn’t want me to go. There’s no way for me to know, and that’s what’s

driving me crazy.”

“Stop thinking about it,” Christy said, crossing the room and sitting down next to me. She

put her stirrer on the coffee table and sipped her orange juice. Then she laughed and turned

towards me. “Let’s make love.”

“You’ll be passed out before I get started,” I said. “And besides, I was just talking about

my mom.”

Christy gulped her orange juice down. She talked right into the glass. “Is that all you can

think about the night you’re leaving me?” She rubbed her legs, which were bare and smooth.

I kissed her, and her teeth felt rough from all the sugar she’d been eating, and her tongue

tasted like citrus. She leaned back onto the couch and pulled up her skirt, showing me she’d

shaved. “Make love to me,” she said, her voice getting sleepy.

“You’re getting tired, baby? You gonna be able to stay up?”

“I don’t know,” she said breathily. Her eyes were starting to close already. She’d put too

much in again. I pulled her skirt back down and said, “Maybe next time.”

“Okay,” she mumbled. I kissed her forehead, and she whispered, “I love you.”

“I know,” I said. “And I’m not worthy.”

She smiled and drifted off to sleep, and I closed her parents’ door quietly behind me.

Douglas had his head on the dashboard when I got back to the car. I slid into the driver’s

seat and looked at him. He didn’t raise his head. “You okay?” I asked.

When he looked up, I nearly retched. A drip-line of blood trickled from his mouth, and

his face was smudged with vomit. He had done it right on the dashboard, where his head had

landed. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

The smell of his breath was awful.

“How did you throw up?” I asked. “We haven’t eaten anything.”

“I feel sick,” he said.

33

“Dude, I need you to drive today.” I didn’t even want to start the engine. I could tell he

wasn’t done. He seemed to know that himself, since he wouldn’t move. His belly puffed out in

quick bursts. “Why don’t you get that handle?” I said. “Open your door and lean out.”

He tried, and it came out again. He had blood in his vomit, and it stank like a rotting

corpse. It went onto the dashboard and into the A/C vents and onto his knees and down into the

foot well. “That PCP,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s bad.” His body retched again, and he let out a whimper. Tears were cutting paths

through the filth on his cheeks.

“I told you we didn’t need that shit,” I said. I got us onto the road and asked what hospital

he used.

“No hospital,” he said. “I can’t afford it.” He spit out some saliva and put his head down

again. The skin on his arms was pale, and the complex tracery of his veins glowed through. He

looked gutted. I pressed the accelerator because I didn’t think he had anything left in him.

“We’re going to the hospital,” I said.

“We gotta make the tribe!” he moaned.

“I’m not arguing with you.”

“We gotta make the tribe, you shit. I already puked it out.” He picked up his head and got

an eye turned towards me. “If you don’t get on that interstate, I’ll kill you.”

I kept my eyes off him. His breath made me want to gag, and my stomach ache was

already getting worse. I figured if we stopped, they’d have to take us both in, and they’d find the

PCP in our blood and maybe even call somebody to cuff us. We couldn’t take that chance, and

Douglas was right that we didn’t have the money. Even if they didn’t find the PCP, they’d still

find out we couldn’t pay and call somebody. And even if they didn’t find the PCP, and didn’t

notice us slipping away without paying, someone might look in this car and think we committed

a murder. Douglas’ seat was now a bloodbath, and with his bangs crusting at the tips and his eyes

red and the fecal stench of his breath, he looked like a madman.

I got on the interstate while I was still making a decision. Then the lanes started sliding

around, blurring and bending. “I think that shit’s catching up to me, too,” I said. “I don’t know if

I can drive.” After maybe another mile, I pulled onto the shoulder.

“You can’t stop here,” Douglas said. “They’ll definitely check on us. It’s rush hour.”

34

Slamming on the accelerator, I took us back into traffic. It was a miracle we didn’t hit

anybody. At the first exit I came to, I pulled us off the interstate and found a service road headed

the other way. Douglas gnawed on a pack of gum, wrappers and all, that Ash had left in the

glove compartment. I tried to keep my eyes from spinning. It was a while before we got back to

the levee. I’m pretty sure we were only doing ten miles an hour, guided more by muscle memory

than conscious thought.

Douglas ate what was left of a box of Cap’n Crunch as we parked the Impala and climbed

up the lee slope of the levee to get to our clutch. He handed me the rest of the crystals on the

way, telling me to carry them because he didn’t want to overdo it. We agreed that Ash must have

gotten some bad shit. They were cold and gritty on my tongue, sharp enough to shave off the

walls of my mouth. They never seemed to dissolve and were hard as hell to swallow. “You can’t

trust drug dealers anymore,” Douglas said and looked wistfully towards the lake. “It’s a shame

really.”

By the time the sun was going down, I was slapping my face, feeling its heat burn off into

a faint but chilling wind running through the thin pin oaks. Douglas kept asking when we would

start hallucinating, and I told him the stuff was weak. “It ain’t gonna happen,” I said, “if it hasn’t

happened by now.”

“You don’t know,” he said, holding his stomach. “You’ve never done this before.” He

put a pan on the fire and sprinkled in some crystals, and they began bubbling and turning into

brown foam. “There we go,” he said, and dropped one of my parents’ ham steaks on top. “We

just needed to cook them.” The ham sizzled and popped and the fat ran out of it and into the

brown foam, causing little detonations of flavor. With the smell of the fat and the angel dust

glaze and the feel of the wind from the lake cooling our skin and the view of the moon hanging

low, I put my hands behind my head and felt okay again about taking one more day before

leaving.

We talked strategy and joked around about having to get naked like Hatch from the first

season. Neither of us would mind that. We were focused on doing whatever it took to win. We

toasted ourselves with the beer we had left and held up the ham on a fork when it was done and

shouted, “To psychological warfare!” And we ate the meat before it had even cooled and used a

spoon to ladle on more of the PCP. My head thumped loudly with each heartbeat. It felt like my

35

temples were ballooning with each ba-bump, and I tried to concentrate on the sound of the water

splashing and somewhere in that sound, Douglas’ voice teaching me how to tie different knots.

“Maybe we could both win,” I mumbled. I felt like my voice was slipping away from me,

like it was a tiger’s tail I had to get both my hands on, but it was moving too fast.

Douglas laughed, took a clump of mud and threw it at my chest. I looked over and found

him through the bonfire, weaving in and out of sight with the flames. The trees were stacked

behind him, growing long and dark with their leaves jittering like they were cold, and behind

them a cell phone tower blinked warnings to aircrafts in landing procedures over the lake.

“You’re pretty far gone,” Douglas said.

I smiled and closed my eyes. A warm glow had spread from my brain stem to my

fingertips. I felt like if I moved, my body would explode. Douglas walked over and put a blanket

on me, and the weight was crushing. “What the fuck is this stuff?” I said.

I rolled my head around so that I was facing the ground and opened my mouth and it all

came out, splattering and bloody. Seeing the mess, I screamed. I put my hands down and tried to

do a push-up to get myself away from the spot, but the grinding in my stomach took all the

strength out of me. What I could see of the vomit was tan-colored and gritty. Some of it looked

like gizzards and parts of my body come up. With the ham chewed down to small bits, it would

have been difficult to tell them apart.

Douglas joined me after a moment. He had been standing up and squeezing his abs trying

to hold it in, but you couldn’t. It was like holding up your hands to stop an avalanche. As his

throat erupted, he repeated my question, “What the fuck is this stuff?”

The lake must have carried the sound of our groans the whole way to the north shore.

When it was over, we washed our faces in the water and listened to the plops of small fish and

watched the thin shapes shuttle in front of us. Douglas said he couldn’t be sure it was over, so I

crawled back towards the fire by myself and collapsed on the ground and tried to sleep.

The next morning he was gone. The bonfire had reduced to smoking ash and the food had

been kicked or thrown all over the place, some of it floating in the lake. In the grass, a line of

blood stretched up to the top of the levee and away into the distance. My body now felt like it

had exploded. The sense of urgency and pressure was gone, and what I felt instead was a dull

tingling at every extremity. I picked myself up and looked for some kind of note or sign, but I

36

had a pretty good idea of where Douglas had gone when I saw that the snap case was missing,

too. Walking down the levee and seeing the tracks from where the car had been parked only

confirmed it. I started toward Ash’s house.

It was about two miles away, and it took an hour. I walked slowly and tried to keep to the

levee, where it was less likely I’d run into a cop. There was no way to hide the final approach,

though, once I’d gotten to Ash’s plot. He’d see me coming for a long way. Each step shook my

bones, and I shivered even though the temperature must have been climbing towards ninety

degrees or more. I was starving, too. I should have eaten before I left.

I headed down the levee when I was close, and walked past the Impala into his courtyard

where he was sitting on the edge of his fountain. Ash was bare-chested, smoking a cigarette,

built like a circus strongman still, after all those years out of the NFL. Douglas’ body was curled

up on the cobblestone floor against a wall. “Is he yours?” Ash asked.

I nodded.

“I figure you helped him take my car. Am I right?”

“I did,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Son, you look like hell. I don’t know if I have the heart to beat up another one of you.”

“It was the crystals,” I said. It hurt to talk. He asked me what I meant, and I pointed at

Douglas’ body. “He’s got the snap case on him. There’s still some left.” I walked over and found

the snap case in Douglas’ pocket and handed it back to Ash. “We just wanna return what’s yours

and get out of here. We’ve had enough trouble.”

Ash’s eyes went wide as he looked down into the snap case and looked at me. I felt guilty

all of a sudden.

“It might not even be yours,” I said. “You don’t look like you do PCP.”

“PCP?” Ash said. “This is feldspar.”

“Well, what whatever it is, it’s no good,” I said. “It tears right through you. We ate

almost all of them.”

“Son,” he said. “This is igneous rock. You’re telling me you ate my rock collection?”

“No,” I said.

“You ate my rocks?” Ash closed the snap-case and stood up. “How fucking dumb are

you?”

“I’ll take my friend off your hands,” I said. “I think we’ve made a big mistake.”

37

Ash looked like someone had stolen his voice. His mouth kept opening but no sound was

coming out. I put Douglas’ arm around my shoulders and said, “I want to give you some money

for your trouble.” I reached into my pocket and handed him the wad of bills we’d been saving for

the L.A. trip. It bloomed out in his palm like the petals of a flower.

Ash squeezed the bills in his hands, and his eyes turned to slits. I started to walk away,

and he stepped in front of me. “Take the money,” he said. “This is just about the sorriest sight I

have ever laid eyes on.”

I shrunk as the bills went back into my hand. The path to L.A. seemed hidden in them,

coded in their arcane symbols. “We’re gonna be on a TV show,” I said. “When we get the prize

money—”

“You’re finally starting to make sense,” Ash said. “Where are the cameras?” He looked

around expectantly. “This is the funniest thing I have ever seen.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hang on and the producer will be here.” I gave a half-hearted laugh, and

I walked away.

It took four hours to walk back to the levee. Douglas smelled like shit, and his hair was

slimier than the inside of a sink pipe. His cheeks were concave and they suctioned to his teeth,

and his eyes look crazed. The old man had beaten him good.

He was semi-conscious when we got back to the clutch, and I laid him down and put

myself down, too, hoping to get some more sleep. My bones were tired, and I still hadn’t eaten

anything. In my semi-coherent thought, I wondered how bad we had it: exposure, dehydration,

and the cumulative effects of a day on the crystals—the feldspar. I fell asleep mumbling to

myself about the million dollars, which still seemed within reach.

When I woke up again, my bones cracked, and I had the worst headache of my life, and

Douglas was floating in the lake with his mouth open, following our food like Pacman. I didn’t

say anything. Nothing could surprise me anymore.

I reached for a box of cereal and put some cocoa puffs in my mouth and barely had the

strength to chew. Most of it fell onto the ground.

Douglas stood up in the water and told me to save some for him. Leeches were all over

his chest.

I started crying.

38

He looked down at himself and said, “Oh. Shit.”

Douglas walked out of the water and asked me to throw him the matchbook. He reached

out his hand, and the slime drained off the heads of the leeches and dripped tiny streams of

blood. Fleas swarmed the wounds. When he stepped closer, the stench of the lake grabbed my

heart. “It’s all right,” Douglas said, and took the matchbox himself. Once in the flame, the

leeches curled into S’s. Douglas flicked each away onto the ground, and I scooted backwards

away from them. He cleared his chest, then he asked me to take care of his back, where two were

left.

I looked around, and the trees were crowded with the eyes of raccoons. Their tiny hands

worked over bits of bark and nuts and rotted leaves and dropped them down in little balls like

seeds. The black shine of their eyes stood out from their fur, which seemed to void the sunlight

that was pouring down on us.

Douglas told me to come on. His voice sounded drugged. I told him we’d been eating

rocks. All he said was, “Well, that can’t be good.”

His hand was still outstretched offering the matches. I wasn’t going to reach out, though.

I wasn’t going to laugh. I was staring into a raccoon’s eyes, and it was looking back.

39

TOOT SWEET

Darnell needs his ass kicked every once in awhile. He’s a consultant for a CPA firm in

New York with enough frequent flyer miles to get to Uzbekistan and back, yet somehow he

hasn’t been home to New Orleans since Katrina. Instead, he goes on business trips to South

Carolina, New Mexico, Washington D.C.—taking in the rest of the country.

Standing on my second-floor balcony with a glass of Jack after each Saints win, I call

him to make him jealous. “You can’t believe what the city is like right now,” I’ll say. “Just from

a football game. There are people singing in front of my building.” A chant will rise up. Who dat

say they gonna beat them Saints! Who dat? Who dat?

“That sounds good, Tre.” Then Darnell will say he has to get off the phone to take care of

other responsibilities.

Here’s my idea of responsibility. I live in midtown close to Carrollton in a rented

apartment. I have since Katrina four years ago. Most of my neighbors are college-aged kids who

aren’t in college, some of whom I coached at Riverbend High School. Strength and conditioning.

I get up at five o’clock in the morning, take the streetcar down St. Charles, work out, teach until

six at night, and return home. Then I do it again. At the end of each month, I visit our parents at

Garden of Memories and listen to the owls hooting from one headstone to the next. You don’t

see me complaining. These days, I can listen to the purple martins on my balcony. I can walk

through my living room, which has a couch and a coffee table and a TV and a Rock Band drum-

set. I can own an Oreck vacuum cleaner as a conversation piece. I like the commercial where

David Oreck stands in a tan suit in front of a gigantic balance and shows that his vacuum weighs

less than an eight-pound gallon of milk. I didn’t know a gallon of milk weighed eight pounds.

When I bought the vacuum, I asked the cashier if she knew how much milk weighed—about the

weight of a newborn baby. We laughed about that. Living in this city, I drink to thank God for

each moment.

One day, Darnell called to say his wife had left him.

I was in my living room playing “Paper Tiger” on Rock Band, watching a cell-shaded

Beck strum his Gibson. Milo, my cat, walked across the table trying to kick off the tape on his

40

paws. He jumped at the vibration of my phone, which clinked together all of the empty beer

bottles on my coffee table.

“I just wanted to let you know,” Darnell said. “Also, I’m quitting trans-fats.” He didn’t

try hard enough to sound upbeat.

“Well, what about coming down for a game?” I asked. “It might make you feel better.”

Before he had moved to New York, Darnell used to love going to the football games with my

father. Give him those four hours of joy, and he’d be happy for the rest of the week. It didn’t

matter that, back then, the Saints lost more games than almost any other team in history. I’d been

trying to get him to come down for four years.

“I’ve got work,” he said.

“You don’t have a phone?”

He sounded as if he was being forced to state the obvious. “I have to see a person in order

to consult them.”

“You can consult the people on the plane.”

He asked why I didn’t go with Ronnie or Derek. I could hear typing in the background.

He was probably talking to me on one of those hand-free phones that scare people in bookstores

until they realize you’ve got a bud in your ear.

“They moved to Mobile,” I said. “They’re teaching fourth grade and making twice my

paycheck.” Besides, they weren’t going through a divorce.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” he asked.

He meant returning to the Superdome. Neither I nor Darnell has been back inside since

the storm. No, we weren’t going to talk about that. Instead, I made a joke. “The question,” I said,

“is whether you’re going to ever want to go back.”

Then his voice cut out. Another call. He told me he had to hang up and said, “I’ll think

about it.”

An hour later, my phone vibrated again. I sat up and muted “There Is a Light That Never

Goes Out.” He was coming. He would fly down on Saturday in the evening, stay the night, see

the game the next day, and then fly out that afternoon.

I tried to get him to stay longer, but he said he absolutely couldn’t, like the CPAs he

advised were on suicide watch. What does it even mean to be a consultant? But whatever. I was

happy.

41

Then came Saturday. I woke up at four in the afternoon and found a half-finished beer on

my nightstand. The stench of sweat clung to my sheets, and my stomach felt like the oatmeal in it

had hardened. I drank the beer to settle it. After I read Darnell’s flight number off my scribbled

post-it note, the airline told me his flight was delayed until six. Plenty of time for clean-up.

I went into the kitchen and stretched my legs out. Milo was asleep on the couch, his snail

toy rolling around his belly with each breath. Darnell was the one who suggested I get him and

his predecessor, a red tabby named Jonas who died after the storm. I wasn’t going to get weepy,

though. I just wanted to stay focused on the task at hand.

I felt like I had steam coming out from under my shirt, so I made my house cocktail:

Campari, rum, and orange juice. A New Orleans original. I raised my glass to Milo, who opened

his green eyes. The rum hit the back of my throat and washed away some of the old saliva taste.

It felt good to be centered again. After drinking it down, I leaned under the faucet and let the

cold water run over my face, massaging my eyelids.

Next I took the clippers from my nightstand and dragged them down through my stubble

and under my chin, feeling tiny cuts open and pulse with my heartbeat. I figured I’d take Darnell

to a nice restaurant tonight. Maybe Galatoire’s. Get him some foie gras and Pinot, if I could

afford it. Then run over to Snug Harbor to hear the Marsalises play some jazz. Finish the night in

the Quarter. First Bourbon Street for drinks, and then to Le Fin Theatre on the western side,

where the doors were open all night and we could climb up to the roof and look at the skyline.

This whole month the corporate-owned buildings on Poydras Street were lighting up at night,

turning into blinking red and yellow towers. I had seen it on the news. Set against the night sky,

with music coming up from the streets, they held an undeniable beauty that I thought would help

when I asked Darnell to come home permanently. There was no reason not to come back now. It

made sense. It’s not like he had to deal with our parents’ house anymore. Those papers were

filed. That stuff was gone.

Milo walked over and purred, as if in assent. Having him rub against my leg was a

familiar comfort. He pawed my hand while I rubbed his belly. Tomorrow Darnell and I could go

to Fatty Sana’s on Magazine, get two Guatemalans and chocolate milkshakes and go to the

game. We could park by St. Joseph’s and walk down Claiborne where the spasm bands would be

dancing and banging on their washboards and soup cans. I shaved around to the other side of my

42

face and turned the razor off, feeling my cheeks to see if I’d gotten everything. Scalpers would

walk up and ask if we needed tickets for the game. We’d already be set.

Why wasn’t there any hair above my right ear? I rubbed around until I felt my curls about

an inch above the bald spot. Milo looked at me and purred. “No,” I said out loud, rubbing the

bald spot again and again. “What the fuck?” When I looked in the mirror, I saw I had shaved

straight up the side of my face, cutting out a landing strip in my curls. As I fired up the clippers

again, I heard a knock at the door that made me jump.

“Yo Tre,” a voice said. “Open up.” It was Darnell.

Are you kidding me? Did his plane land early? I ran into my room looking for my note.

Another knock on the door. “I’m coming!” I shouted and put on a hat.

I yanked on the door so hard I nearly took off the chain. “Sorry,” I said and set it back

into the doorframe. What else could I destroy? I opened the door slowly this time, backing my

head away from the splintered wood.

There was Darnell, getting more handsome as he aged, in a black open-collared shirt and

slacks with a big bag of luggage wheeling behind him. He looked tired, maybe a little sad. I

guess I expected him to be accustomed to long flights.

His head cocked as he sniffed something foul. “Did you just get up?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, what happened? I waited for half an hour.”

I wanted to lie, but the concern on his face was so genuine that I pulled off the hat and

said, “I fucked up my hair.” He looked at me blankly, and I realized I hadn’t explained myself. “I

probably checked the arrival time for the wrong flight. They told me you wouldn’t land until

six.”

He frowned a little and touched the bald spot.

“It’s not a bad look, though,” I said. “You gotta give me that.”

He exhaled for a long time. I felt dizzy and leaned against the doorframe, trying to focus

on his orangish-brown shoes. Wingtips. “Man, Tre,” he said and walked in. As he stood next to

me looking around the living room, I could only guess what he was thinking. I’d meant to throw

away the beer bottles and hide the fold-out TV trays, which made this look like a dorm room.

The plastic guitar, bass, and drum-set didn’t help.

“You’ve still got Milo?” he asked.

43

“He’s somewhere around here,” I said. Must have run into my bedroom when the door

opened. Outside, a light rain began. Some of it splattered through the open balcony door and

onto the hardwood. A pigeon fluttered down onto my railing and then blurred into two. “Come

on,” I said. “Let’s put your stuff down.”

The guest bedroom was big and mostly for storage. I took the spare fan off the bed and

put it in the closet, then smoothed out the white comforter with my hand. Darnell wheeled his

luggage into the corner by the humidifier and put the stuff from his pockets on the nightstand.

Maybe he was too worn out from the divorce to care about being left at the airport?

When we were in the Dome, Darnell’s bag had been taken from him. I still see him

arguing with the National Guardsmen, joined by a woman in a sleeveless green shirt. Her eight-

year-old son had been on dialysis leading up to the storm. Without treatment, the boy had

disappeared inside the Dome. She didn’t know where. She kept telling us, “He’s swollen like a

balloon. He just walked off. He said he was tired. You wouldn’t let him bring his medicine.”

There were so many bodies at the end, cooking in the heat.

He opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a brown leather-bound book. “Hey,” he said.

“This is Mom’s old photo album.” Soon, he’d realize the leather cover smelled faintly of her

perfume. Each page had been mounted with a gold-colored frame, a touch of garishness that was

part of Mom’s style. “When are these from?” He was looking at a picture of us from Easter

Sunday, both of us wearing blue single-breasted suits—me in a red tie, Darnell in a yellow one.

Mom had gotten the suits tailored and cleaned, and when Easter was over she put them in a box

at the top of her closet, where I found them after she and Dad died. I could see her purple paisley

dress, smell the bay leaf floating just beneath the soup pot lid, wobbling as the water boiled. I

could feel the warmth of the sun pouring through the open kitchen door, snapping closed behind

Darnell. Easter morning, he tagged me and ran out. “Not in your clothes,” my mother yelled,

following those words with something incoherent, and then, “Toot sweet, boys. I mean it.”

Darnell turned the page. I could see a smile, an opening. My chest tightened. No crying.

He looked into my eyes. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s finish cutting your hair.”

Milo watched from the barrel of the Rock Band bass drum, fascinated with the sight of

me sitting on the couch holding a bucket. I expected to feel the clippers run in crazy patterns

across my scalp, hear Darnell’s breathing quicken into little bursts. But he made slow, straight

44

lines, sending the curls down onto my shoulders and forearms. I’d look ridiculous walking into

Galatoire’s like this, but they wouldn’t ask questions and that’s what I was looking for. “I’m

sorry I didn’t pick you up,” I said. “I’ve been stressed.”

“I know what that’s like,” Darnell said, taking a second to inspect his work. He ran the

clippers over the same patch a couple times. Must have been a resistant knot. I leaned over while

Darnell worked that one spot. The hair clippings in the bucket looked like something Milo would

cough up. “How have things been here?” he asked.

“The most exciting thing in my life was getting a new vacuum,” I said. “But I did learn

how much a gallon of milk weighs.”

He tried attacking the knot from underneath instead of above. The clippers finally ran

into new territory. “The same as the vacuum?” he asked.

“More,” I said. I thought about making him guess, but I didn’t want to be obnoxious.

“Ten pounds.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering why I was lying about this.

He stepped around to my left side to finish cutting. I tried to think of some other detail to

make it sound more convincing. “They weighed it on a scale with the vacuum. That’s how I

know.”

“Is that two percent or whole?” he asked.

“Two percent,” I said. What a weirdly specific question. I heard his phone ring in the

guest room. He looked towards it and kept cutting. “How are things there?” I asked.

“Not good,” he said. “She took everything. It’s all cash in a lock box. And she took my

TV.”

“Fuck her,” I said. “I hate that bloodthirsty New Yorker mentality.”

He bunched up the side of his mouth. Dusting off the rest of the loose hairs, he said,

“Check it out in the mirror.”

He’d buzzed it down to a millimeter, but it didn’t look bad. It didn’t look good either. I

felt like I’d emptied my pockets, been handed my prison clothes. “This messes up my flow,” I

said.

He laughed. “You’re the one who started this.” So we weren’t going to talk about his

wife.

45

Over in the kitchen, he washed his hands off, then buttoned his cuffs. Even with a day’s

worth of stubble and the sleep weighing down his eyes, he looked composed enough to give a

speech. His face blurred for a second, and I kept my mouth closed. I felt like I’d done enough

talking, though my stomach grumbled loud enough to communicate one message.

“We should probably get some dinner,” Darnell said. Then he gasped as he looked at my

shirt, which had a large blood-red circle on it. “Jesus,” he said.

“Where did that come from?” I pulled the shirt around to look at it.

Darnell scratched at the fabric, then sniffed it. It was Campari.

“Oh, it’s the bitters,” I explained. “It’s from my drink.”

“Yo,” he said, jumping back. He acted like I’d left a rubber cockroach in his food.

“Look. It’s fine.” I pulled the shirt off and showed him I didn’t have a cut. “It’s just a

drink.” While pointing at my ribcage, I fell over and landed on my elbow. Better than dropping

through the glass top of the coffee table again.

He took the shirt from my hands and left the living room. The washer closed with a

resounding bang.

I stared out the balcony door at two cars parked in the street, pointed in opposite

directions. The street lamp flicked on. I didn’t want to send him running. I just wanted to eat

some eggs and plantains at Fatty Sana’s and walk past the spasm bands banging on their pots. I

wanted to feel the vibrations of eighty-thousand people stomping their feet. I wanted to ascend

the interstate on-ramp with brass band music playing.

Darnell came back in the room and handed me a new shirt. “Put this on,” he said. It was

fatigue green with the words “Ruffins for Mayor” across a picture of a trumpet. I hadn’t seen it

in months, lost somewhere in my closet. I put it on and noticed a speckled grease stain on the

right sleeve, like the marking of a pepperoni. And that’s when it hit me. My head was shaved. I

was wearing months-old pepperoni. I was making my brother take care of me instead of helping

him get through his divorce. He was being so nice about it, and I was so drunk I couldn’t even

think.

“Tre,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” The tears started falling. I laid my head on his shoulder. After a minute, I put

my arms around him and kissed his cheek.

46

“It’s okay,” he said, patting my back. “You’re just a little drunk.” I closed my eyes, and

he hugged back. We stood there for a long time.

When it was over, I tripped over the coffee table. We agreed we should order some food.

So much for Galatoire’s, music, and sitting on a roof.

We sat cross-legged on my bed watching SportsCenter and ate General Tso’s chicken

and egg rolls with duck sauce. Later, he put the bed sheets over me and said good night.

According to the clock, I’d only been up for six hours, but it didn’t take me long to fall asleep.

I woke up early the next morning with a headache. Milo was purring on the pillow next to

me, and I lay on my back staring at the rotating fan blades.

Why was I thinking about the airport already? Why did I hear him saying, “Don’t you

start”? Why did I see him wheeling his luggage onto the curb and through the sliding doors?

Why was he already riding up the escalator in a brown suit and brown leather shoes that he

bought for a new job in New York? And why, for that matter, did this have to be his first, and

maybe his only visit, anyway?

The purple martins outside chirped, a sound like shoes on a basketball court. No going

back to sleep. I checked and Darnell was still in his bed, wearing matching pajamas, his head

turned into his armpit, one leg bent, pushing away from the mattress. It was only a matter of time

before he’d leave.

When he got up, I put on a cup of coffee and he came into the kitchen, hair flattened by

the pillow. “You sleep okay?” he asked.

“All right,” I said.

“You want to talk?”

“Nah,” I said. “We should get out of here pretty soon if we want to get breakfast before

the game.” I felt stupid forcing urgency into the conversation, but I had already done the damage.

If possible, I wasn’t going to drink today. I didn’t want him to think I had a problem.

We got dressed and out of the house within an hour. Darnell wore a black New York shirt

with bubble letters. I told him he wasn’t going to make any friends today. “They’ll learn to love

me,” he said.

Outside, a breeze mellowed the heat and flowed through my car windows. It might have

made me feel better—only Darnell acted like I’d never driven before. “Take this left. Watch out

47

for that biker. Slow down.” I didn’t say anything. My job was to focus on the game plan. Food

first.

Fatty Sana’s was crowded, with a line so long we waited thirty minutes to get a booth. By

then we only had an hour until the game started. I wanted to know why Darnell was slumping,

not even making an effort. The walls were covered with pictures of people, mostly kids, eating

and running. Little boys poking their heads out of gumbo pots or mid-sprint through someone’s

backyard, chased by a yellow lab. The glass-topped tables had hardened coffee rings, and the

plastic tablecloths scratched my legs. This was part of the charm. I worked through my

Guatemalan and plantains while Darnell nibbled on his Jewess—potato latkes topped with

scrambled eggs and spinach, all of it hidden under crawfish etouffee. I asked him how it was.

“It’s not gonna be worth taking home,” he said. I finished it for him.

After paying the bill, we had to push through a family of people in Saints jerseys to leave.

By the time we were walking through the spasm bands, I had gas bubbles popping inside my

stomach. I gave a little girl with pigtails a quarter, told her we didn’t want the music, and she ran

off holding it, shouting, “Dad. Dad!” In the parking lot by the corner, tailgaters were finishing up

black-striped franks and teasing the Giants fans walking by. One of them shouted at Darnell,

“Hey, New York! New York! You want to suck my cock?” We kept walking.

Soon, the Superdome came into view, a giant silver column tightened around the waist,

like a fat man wearing a restrictive belt. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

At the entrance ramp, Darnell smiled and elbowed me. “This is it,” he said. All of the

people streaming into the silver dome. Vendors shouting, “Programs…here! Get your

programs!” People bopping to the music. He actually seemed excited. If I had picked him up on

time and we’d gone out to dinner last night and gotten a good night’s sleep, this would have been

fine. I could change my mind about the game. We could go to the park, spend the day talking.

Then again, why should I have to think, “Who knows when he’ll be down here again”?

No turning back. While he nodded his head to the music, I tried to figure out what I was

going to do to hold it together. Walking through security, I didn’t look at the Katrina memorial in

front. We could have been in the picture, or seen the woman with the green shirt looking for her

son, who was swollen, in kidney failure, probably hidden under a seat, still waiting.

We were in the nose-bleed section around the fifty-yard line, with an upside-down view

of the midfield fleur-de-lis. The sidelines were covered with cheerleaders and pneumatic cannons

48

firing T-shirts into the crowd. Ribbons spiraled down from the ceiling and fell into our hair.

Darnell looked up and said, “They still haven’t fixed most of the roof.” He was right. Even

though the holes outside had been patched, there were hundreds of openings showing cabling

and ductwork. During the second day of Katrina, I’d overhead some National Guardsmen

wondering if the ducts could support the added weight of rain water, which was pouring in

through the holes.

When the players burst out of the tunnel onto the field, I started to get tense in my chest. I

needed to leave; I couldn’t relax. A woman next to me was holding her baby, slowly rocking it

back and forth to “When the Saints Go Marching In,” which was thumping through the speakers.

A little boy tugged on her dress, asking for money to go buy a pizza.

“I’m gonna hit the bathroom,” I said to Darnell. Before he could respond, I jumped up

from my seat and jogged into the tunnel.

There was a counter selling beer and hot dogs just a few feet away. A teenager with acne

all over his nose asked me what I wanted. His Polo shirt was un-tucked, his arms crossed.

“Beer,” I said. “Please.” He poured it for me into a plastic cup, and I drank it while he got

my change. On the wall behind him, next to the menu, was a Coke clock that said, “Everything’s

better.” I didn’t know about that, but I was back to familiar sensations. I could stand a three-hour

game.

After kickoff, the noise ratcheted up. Darnell and I could barely hear one another, it was

so loud. We joined in, banging on the railings and shouting as loud as we could. The Saints got a

field goal on their first drive, intercepted soon after, and rolled over the Giants and into the end

zone. The woman with the baby clapped along to “Black and Gold,” as did Darnell.

Then both teams ended a drive scoreless. Darnell drummed on the railing and chatted

with the people around us. Being here didn’t seem to bother him at all.

“So what do you do as a consultant?” I asked.

There was a long pause. “You don’t know?” he said.

“Just curious,” I said.

“I give conferences on employee motivation.”

Up until then, I assumed he just talked about interior decorating or how many phones an

office needed. “You’re kidding,” I said. “So you’re like a motivational speaker.”

He laughed. “No. Those guys sell books. I’m paid to give practical advice.”

49

“So the difference is you don’t have a book?” I said. “That sounds like a fine line.”

He turned towards me, looking over my shoulder—no doubt a practiced expression.

“Well, look at it this way,” he said. “Motivational speakers talk to people who know they have a

problem and paid for the conference. I talk to people who don’t know they have a problem yet.

They’re just going to the meeting their boss called.”

“I see,” I said.

He elbowed me again. “Don’t knock it, Coach. We can’t all work out for a living.”

I filled the moment by picking at a paint chip on the railing. It was hard to find work. I’d

rather coach than talk about everyone’s inner worth. If you weren’t motivated, you didn’t make

the team. It was that simple.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. Shouting at the referees became an easy distraction.

At halftime, I went back up to get another beer—two this time. I told Darnell I was gone

for so long because I had to switch bathrooms. “No paper towels.”

“You’re missing the game,” he said. “Use your jeans.”

“Maybe I should tell the janitor to fill it back up.”

“No,” he said and put his hand on my knee. “Just stay put, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

By midway through the third quarter, I was standing in front of the acne-nosed kid with a

holder for four beers. Only one slot was empty. “When do y’all stop serving?” I asked.

“Ten minutes,” the kid said.

“Then max me out.” He raised his eyebrows and filled another plastic cup. “You need an

attitude adjustment,” I said. “You need a consultant.” He was smart enough not to respond, and I

walked away with the four beers.

Leaning against the wall next to the mustard and ketchup pumps, I drank each one as fast

as possible, hoping Darnell wouldn’t come out into the tunnel and see. When the beers were

done, I wiped the froth from my mouth and burped. I started to feel dizzy again, but it was better

than not being able to breathe.

This time when I got back to the seat, Darnell said, “That’s enough bathroom breaks.”

“I think it’s the eggs,” I said.

50

He looked at me for a second, and then looked out at the field. The Giants were pushing

into field goal range but couldn’t get the yard on third down.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “About last night. I feel like I ruined today.”

He bunched up his mouth again. “Well, if you didn’t drink so much.”

“Why didn’t you come back after the storm?” I interrupted. “It would have been fun to

have you around.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And rebuild my entire life? No thanks.” He scratched the back of his

head, meaning he was annoyed.

“We could have used you,” I said. “You’re on our team.”

“I know,” he said. “But this city makes you an alcoholic.”

Anger crept into his voice. I could have just left it at that. Enjoyed the rest of the game

and taken him to the airport, thankful he came at all. That was probably the right thing to do.

Work slowly. Get him to fall back in love with New Orleans. But he was pushing; I needed to

push back. I didn’t know if I’d have another chance in person. “Don’t you think you owe it to

Mom and Dad?”

“How’s that?” he asked.

My heart was beating so hard I heard it. “Well, I had to identify their caskets after the

storm moved them onto Airline Highway. I had to put Mom’s lace curtains on eBay. Do you

know if they’re real Battenberg?”

“Tre.” His voice dipped at the end in mild disapproval. I felt like I was talking to Darnell

the professional.

“You can’t even answer the question?” I said. “Maybe you can move into my house. Just

cause you moved to New York doesn’t mean you have to act like you hate this place.”

“Don’t yell,” he said. “You’re making a scene.”

He was calm, and I felt the tightening in my chest again. Somehow it had come out all

wrong. I was supposed to have hair. We were supposed to be on the roof of Le Fin watching the

Poydras towers blink, listening to music float up from the street. I was supposed to be a voice of

reason. This was supposed to make sense. I became aware that everyone around us was

watching.

“Let’s get out of here,” Darnell said. He stood up to prove he was serious.

“Sit down,” I said. “It’s the fourth quarter.”

51

He pushed right past me. “Hey Darnell,” I shouted. Unbelievable. I ran after him into the

tunnel. He turned the corner towards the outside doors, moving quickly. I caught him by the

hand, and he shook me off. I could see him running away on Easter morning again. Mom

standing in the doorway in her purple paisley work dress yelling, “Toot Sweet, boys. I mean it.”

“Darnell,” I shouted. “Don’t run away from me.”

He burst open the doors and into the sunlight. An eruption of noise came from behind us.

Saints touchdown. Didn’t that mean anything to him? Didn’t he see what that the city was

getting better? Didn’t he feel something? I used all of my momentum to push him straight to the

ground.

How about that?

“Fuck you,” he said.

I got on top of him and held him down. He twisted his arms, but couldn’t get free. I

pushed his head into the asphalt, and it bounced with a thud. He was trying to look me in the

eyes. I wouldn’t let him. I pushed his head down again, pressing it into the concrete. Then a cop

was coming our way. Giants fans, in the middle of leaving the game, stopped to look at us and

laugh. The cop’s hand was on his gun. It was over. I slid off Darnell. This was the way it was

going to end.

Darnell got to his feet.

I did, too.

“What the fuck?” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“He looks like Morpheus,” someone in the crowd shouted. They were talking about me.

“Hit him,” someone else said, sounding disappointed.

The cop was the voice of reason: “Let’s be civil. Y’all acting like you don’t have any

teeth.”

A laugh went through the crowd. I hated it, but I had to laugh, too.

“Y’all cool?” the cop asked.

“We’re cool,” I said, choppy, still trying to catch my breath.

Darnell walked off again, this time down the ramp onto Poydras. If it had been nighttime,

we could have seen the towers blinking. The Dome would be lit up. We could cancel his tickets,

move the humidifier and the old fan out of my guest room.

52

I caught up to him and gave him my car keys. For being a coach, I was a little

embarrassed at how winded I was, but I managed to get out, “Keep them.”

He stared into my eyes, which throbbed from exertion and heat. A pebble rested in his

stubble, next to his chin. I reached out to brush it away, and he caught my hand. “This is what I

was afraid of,” he said.

“What?” I said. “That we’d have a fight? We’re brothers. We should do this more often.”

“I mean you,” he said.

He held onto my hand. We stood in the crowd. I looked down the street, where the cops

were directing people through traffic. You could hear the music from the dome down at street

level, but you couldn’t feel the vibrations of the stomping anymore. Far in the distance, you

could see a group of old people huddled together under the overpass, a man whispering into

another man’s ear. A paper bag passed between them.

We walked to the car. I sat in the passenger seat. Eyes straight ahead. I didn’t say

anything.

Back at home, he opened the door. I helped him pack his bags, called a cab for him, and

stayed seated when he told me goodbye. He stood over me with his bubbled New York logo

staring me in the face. We hugged awkwardly for a moment, him bending down to make it

happen, and I felt the roughness on his face where it skidded against the gravel.

From my balcony, I watched him get in the cab and drive off, a flash of yellow. The cab

drivers around here always drove too fast. He might like that. I saw Darnell back in New York

preparing for a divorce. Darnell talking to people who didn’t know they had a problem. Darnell

coming here to say, “I mean you.” Then flying away.

I went to bed and petted Milo and sat for a long, long time saying those words. It took

hours for me to close my eyes and fall to sleep, and hours for me to wake up again, alone. I made

myself breakfast and stood on my balcony. The sky was getting light, and up and down the street

the porch doors opened. My shirt stuck to my chest with sweat from the New Orleans heat.

Later that morning, I got on the interstate and drove out of town to Lafayette and then

west to Texas to see what it’d feel like to be away from home where there are cold seasons and

buildings tall enough to block the sun and houses that have stood for hundreds of years. And you

know what I saw? There are people there, too. But they live so far away, and I’ll never have time

to know them all.

53

A MANSION DOWN THE ROAD

Jay said he wanted me to meet other writers, make connections, establish myself in their

company. Then we got to the Kimberlin writers’ colony. Why was I wearing jeans? How would

people know we’d arrived with the car parked in the back? If it would take two trips for me to

bring in his luggage, it would take two trips. He needed his hands free to talk to people.

“I understand,” I said. He was Jay Black, even if his last book was about his cat. As his

personal assistant, understanding was my job.

We walked on a narrow path cut through a pine forest with trees thirty-feet-high. The

parking lot was off the main grounds, deliberately placed on one end of the property so on your

walk-in you’d see the reflecting pool, the art installations, the gardens, the greening stone

staircases, and finally the mansion—crenulated, ancient, the smell of seafood wafting from the

windows. Upstate New York chirped and warbled around us, beautiful in its serenity. Next time I

came, I vowed it wouldn’t be for just one night to drop off Jay.

The lobby, which connected to the eastern wing, had its doors open. We squeezed into a

crowd of faces I’d seen on dust jackets. It didn’t take long to notice that most, though, were

eyeing the old man in the center of the room: short and squat, with wavy shocks of white hair

and boxer’s fists the size of lunch-pails, dressed in a blue flannel shirt unbuttoned at the top.

Marcus Naylor holding center court, arguing with a guy half his size.

“Which wife was that?” the other guy said. Dark shiny hair, stubble, black plastic glasses.

He looked like a writer.

Naylor put on his famous sneer and puffed out his chest. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “All

of them are out of your league.”

“Oh yeah?” the guy said. He puffed his chest out, too. But he was so much smaller. He’d

have to claw his way up Naylor’s chest just to reach Naylor’s head.

We all laughed at him.

Then I looked at Jay, who was eyeing me. “You’re drooling,” he said.

After checking in, we went to Jay’s room. Ornamental lamps in the corners, a cedar chest

next to the bed, and a leather Chesterfield couch by the window. With the light fading from the

sunset, I thought I’d walked into another century. I set Jay’s luggage next to a rocking chair and

54

peeked into the bathroom, where they had one of those tubs with lion’s feet. “I wish I could stay

here and write,” I said. Instead, it’d be back to the dorm room. White walls and the cursor

blinking.

Jay opened his bag and unfolded his clothes, floating dust motes through the yellow strips

of light created by the blinds. He put a suit on, and I did, too—including my Cheever-esque

hound’s-tooth jacket. Standing in front of the mirror, I wondered how Cheever would act here.

Gratitude, humility, charm. I wrote a few notes on the back of my packet. I wanted to capture the

dust motes, the image of me standing in a hound’s-tooth jacket, the sound of water running into a

tub with lion’s feet.

When Jay came out of the bathroom, he began to tell me how to maximize this

experience, seemingly calm again. I wrote more notes: be confident, but not too confident. You

don’t want to be creepy. But you also don’t want to seem boring. Order big. “You should try the

lobster at dinner,” Jay said. Then he stopped.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What is that?”

I was holding a packet of my short stories. I liked giving them to people as a kind of

forget-me-not. A shitty forget-me-not, but one that represented who I was. “It’s my manuscript,”

I said. “There are agents here.”

“You’re not going to hand that out to people, are you?” Jay said. He fell against the

doorframe so hard the window rattled.

“I just thought it’d be a good opportunity to get some pointers.”

Jay took the manuscript out of my hands. “I’ll give you pointers. But don’t bother people

with this. They’re here to relax.”

He put the manuscript in his bag and zipped it up, then slid the bag under his bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt like I was missing something. Wasn’t I here to make

connections? He looked at me like I had a mole on my face that kept moving around.

“Look,” Jay said. He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “Just give me a chance

to look at it first. Deal?”

“Okay,” I said. “I promise I won’t show it to anybody.” We could hear people walking

past our room. I could still get things in motion. Maybe Jay would like the stories and pass them

along after I left. He had transported illegal immigrants across the Mexican border, traveled to

55

the Philippines and eaten balut on a dare, and agreed to have his books psychoanalyzed in front

of a live crowd—all so he could write about those experiences. He knew what he was doing.

“Good,” he said. “You reminded me of Gaston for a second.” This was a character from

his second book, a butler living in-house with a family of geniuses who was always trying to

come up with his own patents. Over the course of the book, he begins to suspect the children

aren’t really helping him when they look at his schematics.

“I liked Gaston,” I said. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“I know, right?” Jay said. “He was a good character.”

We walked into the hallway and joined the crowd of people. I wondered if any of them

had read Jay’s last book, Mr. Pussywinkles? A series of cat adventures shelved, tragically, in the

“Lit/Fiction” section of most major bookstores.

“Plenty more where Gaston came from,” I said.

A hint of anger appeared in Jay’s voice. He nodded, as if convincing himself. “You got

that right.”

The dining room was a long hall with a counter full of silver chafing dishes at one end,

twice as many tables as necessary at the other. The silverware was all real silver, and each table

was decorated with heavy linens and an ancient-looking candelabra. It was beautiful. The smell

of rosemary, garlic, and lemon floated in the air. For the appetizer, they served everyone oysters

en brochette. When I tasted them, I had trouble believing how good they were. The oysters were

crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle. The flavor of bacon and butter settled down into a

nice lemony aftertaste. I sat back in my chair and laughed, it was so good. The rest of the table

heard me moan and laughed, too. We toasted the founders of the Kimberlin Estate.

“And to the world’s greatest authors,” I added.

After Jay introduced me, people asked where I was from, how I knew Jay, and what I

wrote. I told them about taking Intro to Creative Writing with him, and then Advanced Fiction

Workshop the next semester, and how excited I was when he asked me to be his personal

assistant. “I just want to keep learning,” I said. “This is the kind of opportunity I dream about.”

Jay laughed and said, “Doing my laundry is a dream job, huh?”

56

We all drank wine—all except for one guy who was sitting across from me and staring.

He was baby-faced with close-cropped hair and dark black glasses. His face was slightly red, like

he’d just gotten a chemical peel. He jutted out his chin in a contemplative way.

He didn’t react when I looked at him, so I assumed he was daydreaming.

Dinner came, followed by after-dinner drinks, which I was told was a Kimberlin

tradition. They were sweet and creamy. I gnawed on my cinnamon sticks until I realized just how

drunk I’d gotten.

Then someone suggested we go to a bar. I wasn’t twenty-one, which wasn’t a problem

around campus. But I was still learning the ropes for upstate; in the country, they might be

stricter. And if I was carded at the door and rejected in front of all of these writers, I would never

live it down. So I pulled Jay aside. “I think I’m going to turn in,” I said.

“Why?” Jay asked.

“It’s getting late, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go out. You know.”

Jay punched me in the shoulder hard. “I need you to keep your ears open in case they talk

about me.” He emphasized the next part. “They like you.”

“Right,” I said. He wanted me to be his spy? I went to Plan B. “It’s just that there was a

guy staring at me all dinner, and I think he was making fun of me in his head, you know? I’d just

rather not make you my babysitter for the night.”

“Which guy?” Jay asked.

“The baby-faced one.”

“Oh, Cal?” Jay said. “He just wanted to fuck you. He goes for anything that’s not legal.”

“Well, now I definitely don’t want to go to the bar.”

“It’ll be fine,” Jay said. “I’ll keep an eye on you. Just don’t flirt with him. He’s not a bad

guy.”

I looked down the hallway towards the rooms. Most of the other writers had already left.

I was worried our voices were carrying. It occurred to me that if I stayed, Cal might stay, too.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go for a little while.”

The bar sat between a Chinese restaurant and an auto repair place about three miles out

the gate from the writer’s colony. It was a converted barn that still had wooden rafters and stray

hay bales up near the ceiling. The logo on the bartender’s shirt was a cowboy hat. When Jay and

57

I got there, it seemed like the writers had taken over the place. Several were grinding on the

dance floor, wearing novelty hats. Claudette Olivier, an agent who I knew used to date Jay, was

making it obvious to everyone she’d left her bra back at the mansion. She danced over to us,

holding a drink and a Burger King crown for Jay, and pulled him onto the dance floor.

Now that everyone was drunk, the group was breaking off into twos and threes. I thought

about going over to the other writers, but they seemed to know one another. So much for

eavesdropping. I didn’t know what Jay expected me to overhear anyway, other than people

making fun of him. I went with my other option for conversation, even though I must have been

the youngest person at the bar. It was going to be like shooting the shit at a retirement home. I sat

next to a woman sipping on a pink drink and told the bartender what I wanted with an exhausted

voice, like I’d just gotten off a long day at the mill. It worked. He didn’t ask for my ID.

“I’m Alan,” I said to no one in particular.

The woman with the pink drink looked my way. She was pretty for her age, with nice

green eyes. Then she opened her mouth. “All the time?” she asked. Her breath smelled like cat

food, and her teeth were brown.

“As far as I know,” I said. One of Jay’s creeds was “If you don’t live it, you can’t write

it.” In my mind, that went against the whole idea of fiction, but he used it as motivation to ride

out uncomfortable situations. Whatever’s good for the writing.

She lit a cigarette and shook my hand. “I’m Becky. At least tonight.”

The bartender glanced our way. I got a funny feeling I was talking to a prostitute.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked. She handed me her pink cocktail. I must have looked

confused, because she said, “Don’t worry. There aren’t any roofies in it.”

“That’s about when I normally start worrying if there are roofies in my drink,” I said. She

didn’t react. “Really. I’m okay.” I shook my glass so the ice tinkled. She shrugged and took her

drink back.

Over on the dance floor, Jay was making out with Claudette. “Help. Please,” I thought.

Claudette’s head tilted back, her hair tucked into the trucker hat, her eyes closed. I was

embarrassed that her world was being rocked by a guy who wrote about a cat named Mr.

Pussywinkles.

“So do you read any books?” I asked Becky.

58

“Sure,” she said. “The ones with pictures.” She exhaled smoke into my face and let the

ice in her glass tinkle, too. “You know, once the Jews are all dead we won’t have to worry about

people eavesdropping on us.” She looked at the bartender.

He smiled big and wide for her. “Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?” he said.

“I have a house,” she said. “It’s on a hill.”

“I know you do, darling. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

“Well, I aim to,” the woman said, sliding off her stool. “Maybe you all will try and rape

me if I stay around here.” The bartender laughed. I told her not to forget her purse. She held out

her arm, like Gloria Swanson letting you kiss her hand. I put the purse over her shoulder and told

her goodbye.

After she left, the bartender said, “She’s a little crazy.”

“No shit,” I said. “I couldn’t tell if she was a prostitute or a conspiracy theorist.”

“What makes you think she can’t be both?” The bartender poured more bourbon into my

glass and made a rum and Coke for himself, too. “On the house,” he said and drank it down.

Probably you had to have a sense of humor with a job like this. “You with them?” he asked,

nodding towards the people on the dance floor.

“We’re all at Kimberlin, but I don’t know them.”

“Is that the mansion down the road?” he asked. “I didn’t know anyone lived there.”

“It’s a writers’ colony,” I said. Then added, “It’s pretty famous.”

He shrugged. Not impressed. “I always thought it was a cult,” he said. “Just joking. But I

didn’t know anything happened there.”

I nodded, staring into my glass. It’s not like the bartender should know about Kimberlin,

but just knowing it wasn’t important to one person made it seem childish for me to. I ordered

another drink, and we talked some more, but the conversation hit dead-ends. Eventually, he

poured drinks more than he talked. I got the message and paid my tab. There weren’t going to be

any big book deals for me tonight. That was okay. But it was probably time for me to go home.

Then Marcus Naylor walked through the door. He wore a hound’s-tooth coat and a loose-

fitting tie with a black Stetson on his head. I tried not to stare as he walked with a low center of

gravity, taking careful steps across the dance floor. He seemed so feeble. He removed the Stetson

and batted off the water, looking around. No one else noticed him, a fact he seemed to

59

acknowledge by putting the hat back on. Then he was headed toward me. My heart jumped. Why

didn’t I have my manuscript?

By the time he sat down, I was already imagining our conversation. I had done this

before. With a firm voice, I’d say, “I’ve got that drink.” And when he’d thank me, I’d say,

“You’ve been my hero since I could read. I’m Alan Stokely.”

He’d put his hand on mine. “I know who you are.”

“You do?” I’d say.

And with a coy look, he’d say, “The saltwater intrusion article.”

“You read that?” This was something I’d written for my college newspaper about

declining fish populations. “How?”

“I caught it on the internet. I thought it avoided the usual clichés and came up with

something real sharp. Real sharp.” Marcus would drop small white circles into both of our

glasses then. And before I could wonder if I was about to be roofied by a National Book Award

winner, he’d say, “I hope you’re still writing. We need you.”

I would have paid anything to hear that. I put the glass in front of my mouth and tried to

come up with something real. All I could think of was “I like your books. Can I buy you a

drink?” I felt like Urkel. I needed to get it together. I couldn’t think. I knew I was staring, and

Naylor’s head started turning towards me, and if I didn’t say something then, I was going to be

the creepy guy staring at him, like Cal did to me at dinner. I was halfway through talking myself

into running away. Then Naylor looked me in the eyes, and I broke. “I’m Alan,” I said. “Sorry

I’m sitting so close.”

He asked me if I was okay.

I proceeded to tell him everything I loved about his writing.

He smiled.

That saved me from crying.

He welcomed me to Kimberlin and asked me what project I was working on while I was

here.

“Oh,” I said. Manuscript, manuscript, manuscript. “I’m just here for the night. I’m going

to stay in Jay’s room and drive back tomorrow.”

Naylor got a funny look on his face. “But you’re staying at the mansion?” he said.

“Yeah. I ate dinner with everybody. Lots of new names to Google.”

60

Naylor frowned.

“It’s an internet thing.” I said.

And he said, “I should probably be heading back.”

As he walked away, I thought, “What did I say?” There wasn’t anyone else nearby to tell

me. For all I knew Naylor was a sleeper agent, and I’d just said his code word. I didn’t even

bring up my stories. Maybe, I told myself optimistically, this was a hazing process. Maybe

Becky was in on it, too. And maybe not. Maybe I had just insulted my hero. Or Jay had gotten

me in trouble for eating dinner with the other writers. Either way I wanted to find Jay, and

neither he nor Claudette was anywhere to be seen.

I asked around the dance floor and checked outside. No one had talked to Jay in a while.

The bar wasn’t big enough to hide them, and he clearly wasn’t at one of the tables. I figured he

probably caught a cab back. Or maybe he had gone for a walk. Or maybe he was in the

bathroom.

As soon as I opened the door, I heard them. I told myself it wasn’t Jay and Claudette

grunting in the stall. One was a heavily-awarded writer, the other an agent who represented a

Pulitzer Prize winner. You have to be intelligent to do that. You have to be able to resist the

temptations of the body. Then I saw Claudette’s head rising above the stall sidewall, facing away

from me. Her trucker hat tipped and fell to the floor, by Cal’s feet. He was leaning against the

condom dispenser, smoking a cigarette. He motioned me over, excited, with a finger on his lips.

This was pretty far beyond what I wanted out of my night at Kimberlin. I didn’t ever need

to walk in on my teacher having sex, nor did I want someone inviting me to participate in the

event. I had already decided to leave without Jay when he said something that made me stop.

They were still going at it, but I could have sworn Jay said, “Three-book deal.”

And then I heard Claudette say, “Two-book deal. Don’t touch that.”

Cal gave me a thumbs-up. His face still had that reddish tint, like he’d gotten a chemical

peel. Could I see both hands?

“Three books,” Jay said. “I want security.” And I was pretty sure from her sudden intake

of breath he touched “that.”

Straining, Claudette said, “Throw in the boy, and I’ll think about it.”

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Now there was no way I was leaving. Were they really talking about me? I had no idea

this is how you sold books. This was actually a lot cooler than I thought. For the first time today,

I felt like I was getting insight into the process.

Cal nodded at me, as if to say, “Right?”

I gave a thumbs-up back. This was good stuff.

Jay said, “Maybe.”

“Is the kid any good?” Claudette asked.

“He’s a good chauffeur,” Jay said. “And a good kiss-ass. He gives me better self esteem.”

“I’ll take him,” Claudette said. “He looks like a virgin.”

“All right,” I shouted. “You think I’m a virgin?”

The grunting stopped behind the stall door. I waited for Jay to say something, but he

didn’t. Claudette was the one who made a noise, a laugh, one of those quick condescending ones

out of your nose. She appeared above the stall door and looked down at me. “Don’t get pissed,

kid. I was just joking.”

It was me they were talking about. “That’s great,” I said. I turned to walk out the door for

the second time since I’d entered, and Cal’s hand fell on my shoulder.

“You can raise my self-esteem,” he said. “In my room.”

I shrugged his hand off. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“It’ll give you something to write about.” He winked, smiling too wide, mocking me. I’d

bet he loved his role as the gay guy, and he probably loved playing with the lackeys that every

self-obsessed writer dragged along to these writers’ colonies.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I went straight to the car and drove away.

Back at Kimberlin, I parked on the grass in front of the door and caused a motion-

sensitive light to flick on. It was eerily quiet for a place surrounded by the woods. Inside, I got a

chill from the A/C. I walked through the main lobby, past the cafeteria, and down the dark

hallway towards the dorms. Although I tried to walk softly, each step sent echoes reverberating

throughout the mansion.

When I got to the room, I sat down on the bed. The will to drive back to Long Island

drained away as soon as my head hit the pillow. I put on my pajamas and went to the bathroom.

62

But I couldn’t even pee without embarrassing myself, ending up with a dark spot over my crotch

because I didn’t shake enough.

That’s when I heard a knock at the door. “Go away,” I said.

The knock repeated.

“Just sleep in her room,” I said.

Then a voice: “I need to talk to you.” It was Naylor.

He had taken off the Stetson and hound’s-tooth jacket, revealing taut suspenders running

over his broad shoulders. “Can I help you?” I asked.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You mean Jay?”

“No, I’m looking for you,” he said. “Don’t make people repeat themselves. That’s

annoying.”

My manuscript was still under Jay’s bed. “Would you like to come in?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I should be asleep already. I just wanted to let you know that I checked

with management and you can’t stay here.”

I felt gut-punched. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s nothing personal, you understand? It’s just there are limited resources here. They’re

only for professional writers. Okay?” He patted me on the shoulder.

“Okay,” I said. My legs wobbled. My face got hot. I could tell something was about to

happen, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Limited resources? Only

for writers? I was going to hit Marcus Naylor, who had won a National Book Award. I was

going to punch him in the face.

“I’m sorry to do this to a fan,” he said. “But those are the rules.”

I snapped. “Do you know why I’m keeping my hands around my shorts?” I shouted.

“Because I have urine on my pants, and I was afraid you’d see it.” I let him look. “And now I’m

going to tell you about the time I lost my virginity.”

“Please don’t,” the old man said.

“When I was eighteen, I got my girlfriend drunk and wanted to have sex with her. But I

ripped the condom. So I told her I had a back-up plan, and then made her use my mother’s

diaphragm. And you know what happened to that girl? She faked a pregnancy so I wouldn’t

leave her, and then she cheated on me. And you know what else?”

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My eyes were throbbing. I felt weightless. The old man looked me in the eyes, through

the filter of thousands of experiences and not one of them like this.

Before I was done, I’d told Naylor about every criticism Jay had laid on me, about all the

times I had done his laundry, about finding Mr. Pussywinkles’ heartworms in the litter box, and

about fighting with my father over getting another job. “Don’t tell me this place is for writers,” I

said. “I am a writer.”

And you know what Naylor did? He laughed. Somewhere along the line, he had started

loving this. He laughed so hard, he probably woke up everyone else who hadn’t gone to the bar. I

had a hard time getting him to stop. “Your mom’s diaphragm,” he said. “That’s fucked up.”

“I wish it wasn’t true,” I said.

“Can I use that?” he asked.

“No,” I shouted.

Naylor looked off for a moment down the dark hallways, as if he could see the future. He

was still smiling. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I like you.”

“You don’t know me,” I said.

Naylor’s face softened, as if he wanted to tell me something. But I didn’t want the

conversation to go any further. I told him I’d be out in the morning and shut the door on him.

Laying down on the bed, I could feel a part of me falling away. I couldn’t see the clock,

but it was ticking. I could hear the echoing steps of a group of people returning from the bar. The

sound of Jay’s voice put me on my feet again.

I clenched my teeth, but I didn’t turn at the sound of the door opening. Instead, I pulled

Jay’s luggage out from under the bed, held up my manuscript, and tore it down the middle. My

whole body shook as the pages fell out of my hands and drifted to the floor.

“Are you okay?” Jay asked.

Outside, the sound of a car’s engine cut through the walls. You could hear the tires

adjusting to the curb as the car pulled onto the mansion’s property. Then the engine killed,

revved, and started again with a loud bang. I listened, and I felt my heart beating slower. All the

way up the driveway, the car stalled and started with its engine groaning. When Jay repeated his

question, I kept listening, thinking about how nice it’d be to see that you were making progress.

64

GO TO SLEEP

One night, I was sitting in my bedroom alone trying to write music, drifting off to sleep

with the guitar across my chest and my head crowded with images of my grandfather, when Jane

called. This was when I was living in Cleveland and trying to make enough money to return to

New Orleans. Jane was dating other people, though the fallout from the divorce hadn’t kept us

from speaking. In her voice, there was still sympathy lit by the old fire. Not passion necessarily,

but sympathy. She sent flowers from time to time and encouraged me to get on medicine, which

I did, and to see a therapist, which I did, and to be around my children.

Mercifully, I didn’t see her too much, and I took time to write and walk through my

neighborhood, which was lined with glorious, tall pine trees that changed color in the winter and

sagged with ice and warmed the bodies of thousands of carpenter ants I could see moving with

purpose in and out of the surface of the bark. This was the experience of getting better, my

therapist told me. I should appreciate the small things.

That’s exactly what I wanted to do when Jane surprised me with the phone call and asked

me to watch the kids while she went on a date.

“I need the night off,” she said. “I’ve got a meeting with an employer that just came up,

and I’ve gotta run to Tower City. He expects some kind of Christmas gift.”

“Is it Eric?” I asked.

She sighed and said, “Yes.” I didn’t know why she felt the need to lie about it.

Technically, he wasn’t her employer anymore.

I arrived wearing a collared shirt and a new sweater and clean slacks and, though snow

was on the ground and I was wearing dress shoes, I walked straight through the yard to the door.

A crust of ice cracked as I pressed the buzzer and my visible breath swept into the house and

disappeared when Jane flung open the door. She was in a red dress with straps in the shape of a

“V” crossing her chest. A blonde highlight striped through her brown hair and formed a long

curve, like an attractive scar, that fell beside her face and made her look younger. She was

wearing lipstick, and she smelled like an orchid.

Our children, Danny and Lola, clung to her legs. She thanked me for coming on short

notice, and I assured her it was my pleasure. I was happy we were getting to a place where she

trusted me to do favors. That was all I could ask for.

65

When the kids detached from her and cried and eventually were strapped into the car as

they continued crying, I honked twice and waved goodbye. She waved back from the open

doorway, bracing one bare arm against the cold.

I turned the radio up to listen to the Indians game and asked if the children had eaten

dinner. They were six. They were crying so hard they couldn’t tell me.

Tommy’s is a kid-friendly restaurant on a busy street in Cleveland Heights that attracts a

lot of college freshmen. I went there for the old-style canopy hanging over the door, and the

illusion of small-town charm from the wait staff, and the homemade milk shakes. I had a regular

waiter who led us now to the back room, where the tables were a little less crowded. He asked

me if I’d been listening to the game. His name was Tommy, just like the restaurant, and he was a

big enough baseball buff to have heard of my grandfather and to maybe have even seen a

baseball card of the old man in a Washington Senators uniform back in the sixties. Grandpa was

a right fielder with an explosive bat who hit enough homeruns to balance out his missed catches.

He was famous for a while for being unreliable in the field, but dominant at home plate, and

people knew him as one of the first all-star liabilities. Of course, that was a description that

seemed to fit most players today, for other reasons.

Tommy brought out the menus and gave me his analysis of the team to date. He seemed

to think if we could get just one more closer, we’d be a lock for the postseason. “I still think they

ought to give you a call,” he said, half-jokingly. “I’ll bet you still have the rocket.” He squeezed

my bicep and slapped it. “That’s a rock,” he said.

I thanked him and looked at my kids. They were staring open-mouthed at the sizable

menu and drooling. Tommy attended to them like they were his own children, and I put in my

order and excused myself for a second while he tried to prove they could still speak English.

In the bathroom, the fluorescent light erased the shadows from under my eyes. I hadn’t

been sleeping well. The song I had been working on, called “Go to Sleep,” wasn’t helping. It was

about Jane, about being back with her, which I recognized might be another sign that I was going

insane. I pulled a vial from my pocket and gave myself one-time permission to lay out a line of

cocaine during kid duty. There was a person in the stall, but I got the impression he wouldn’t be

coming out for a long time. As I bent down, my face grew large in the mirror, tightly framed,

with my gaunt features on closer inspection looking like the color of a band-aid and my lips

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frosted with dead skin. I inhaled one line and chopped out another, trying not to stare into my

eyes, which seemed to move on their own, working with the eyebrows to appear threatening. I

started sweating from the steady burn and breathed in the other line. It felt like the avenues into

my brain had been lit on fire. Gradually, I became aware of the fact that I was mumbling. I was

certain the person in the stall was now waiting for me to leave.

I went back to the table, and Tommy looked distressed. “I didn’t want to leave them,” he

said, running off. “But you can’t do that to me, man.”

I promised I’d show my gratitude in the tip, and settled back into my chair at the head of

the table. Danny and Lola had their hands pressed into their laps and their shoulders bunched up,

mouths tightly wound, like they were springs about to burst into action. “You guys order

something good?” I asked.

Lola nodded enthusiastically.

I saw why they were so excited when the food came out. They had ordered taco salads,

big tortilla bowls filled with textured vegetable protein, or TVP, this ground-beef-like substance

that tasted good and bounced off the floor like a rubber ball. Before I could lay down the rules,

the first handful was in the air, Lola firing a shot at Danny, which was followed by return fire.

An old woman at the table next to ours got a confetti shower of fake meat, and then splatters of

ketchup. I stood up and put my hands on the chest of either child, and they treated my arms like

cover from incoming fire. Each leaned to the side and threw more fake meat, and my heart

bumped against my rib cage hard enough that I thought my bones might crack. “Enough!” I

shouted, and the kids went from ecstasy to tears immediately.

None of our neighbors seemed appreciative of the fact that I’d stopped the madness. In

fact, they seemed more annoyed that my voice, on top of the sensation of thrown food, had added

to the interruption. I put each child on one of my hips and turned towards Tommy, who had been

on his way over with their milkshakes. “Just take my wallet out of my pocket,” I said, which he

did. I didn’t even watch how many bills came out before the wallet slipped back into my pants.

“I’ll be back for formal apologies,” I told him, and directed a general apology towards the rest of

the room. People had already started talking, though, and my voice was swallowed in the dense

wooden walls and the noise.

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We went back to the boarding house and up to my room, where I thought I could keep

them quiet with some movies. Lola had a strong affinity for princesses in distress, and Danny

didn’t seem to like anything but would zone out easily and turn into a vegetable if you gave him

a distraction. It wasn’t until we got in my room that I noticed he was wearing a baseball shirt

with my old number. And although he had gotten ketchup on it, I felt bad for making fun of him

in my head. It shamed me to think my perception of them was based purely on bad behavior that

only happened when I was around.

The coke had given me a headache so bad it felt like there was a saw blade in my head,

so I set the kids in front of the TV and went over to the metal rack in my closet that served as a

dresser. I opened the bottle of Tylenol and took about a handful, then noticed that my phone, and

not just my head, was ringing. It was a text from Jane asking how things were going.

I checked the time. “Just settling into our PJs for a movie,” I wrote back. “Having a great

time.” Then I made the kids get in their pajamas. Funny how I forgot about their schedule until

the warden checked in. They went to bed at nine, which was basically my schedule, too.

I polled them for which Disney movie they wanted to watch, and Danny told me he

wasn’t a baby and wanted something with action. I resisted the temptation to point out that

everything they’d done thus far suggested they were, in fact, still babies. I let them rummage

through my DVDs and Danny picked out a slasher flick, which Lola vetoed. Eventually, they

both agreed on the The Princess Bride, a movie so old I had watched it as a kid. They said it was

their favorite movie to watch with Eric. His name stung, but I got around to thinking maybe I

was equal with him, and that was a good thing. I had to remember to set my expectations low,

after all that they had seen.

While they watched the movie, I sat back and opened a book about the fall of Rome. I

tended to skim weird books when I was working on a song. Nothing that had to do with my

subject matter, but something that I expected would have combinations of words I could use.

Little snippets to turn into lyrics. I had read about other artists doing that, and I felt it was helpful

to me, even though more often than not I ditched the ideas that came from this activity. It was a

way of keeping my brain working.

I had been especially troubled with the final lines of “Go to Sleep.” Currently, they were

“You’re right / Baby, by this time / It’s not the weather / That keeps you tonight.” But I wasn’t

sure people would understand why I said that. It had been a way of affirming my trust in Jane

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that she wouldn’t cheat again. But it had come out as an ambiguous expression that, at best, sort

of got at what I meant but, more likely, just made the listener ask, “What does he mean? What

kind of weather?” Sticking in something with identical syllables didn’t feel right, either, like if I

said, “It’s not cold winter / That keeps you tonight.” The whole thing just seemed like a pathetic

fantasy, and I worried that if Jane ever heard it, she’d laugh.

I picked up my guitar, and Lola said, “Dad, don’t. We’re watching the movie.”

I looked over her head. It was the scene where Andre the Giant tries to crush Cary Elwes’

head with a boulder. “I’m just going to hold it,” I told her.

My grandfather didn’t always show up in my dreams, but when he did it was usually to

remind me of how little time I had left. I remember dreaming once that men in black coats took

me to his house, a yellow-brick two-story home in the old style of post-WWII housing, that had

been obliterated in Katrina with him in it.

They led me through his yard, which was tree-less and verdant and sprinkled with

crushed shells kicked up from the driveway, and into his living room, which was musty and

yellow with sunlight. Grandpa was in his reclining chair, wiggling his feet to a rhythm in his

head, and he invited me to sit with him and watch the horse races. He appeared as I knew him

best, in his sixties with rosacea on his cheeks and a tall cup of water at his side. This was after he

quit drinking. He told me he had gone to my game—I was on the local AAA team—and he had

been impressed with how well I played. I knew he was an unreliable critic. I was never going to

make it to the pros, and I later quit after only two years, but he always made sure to say he was

proud of me, even though I was a young man at that point.

His second favorite topic was to ask me when I’d propose to my girlfriend. He loved

Jane. He gave nicknames to all of the people he loved, and when I started dating her, I went from

“Brave” to “Tarzan” and she became “Jumping Jane” because that was how she danced with the

old man at parties in his house. He liked to say, jokingly, that he was wasting away in a put-on

old man voice, like you’d hear on TV. I promised I would propose when I was ready, and he got

a little smile anytime he heard that. In real life, Grandma would slap his feet and tell him to stop

bothering me with all of that stuff. “That stuff” basically described anything Grandma didn’t

like, including half of the world’s activities: “North Korea better watch it with that stuff.” But

she never showed up in the dreams. The Dream Grandpa would be uninterrupted and praising

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and sly and he’d wait with me as the shadows lengthened and we sat in our chairs losing money

on horses that didn’t exist.

Lola woke me up by shaking me. I had fallen asleep while thinking about falling asleep,

and I saw the movie was over. They had been so transfixed they hadn’t noticed me checking out

either.

“Daddy, you’re bleeding,” Lola said.

“What?” I said.

“Your nose.”

I wiped my upper lip and looked at my index finger. “It’s from the cold,” I said. “I’m

sorry.”

Lola bit her lip and looked scared. Danny was sitting against the radiator rubbing his back

against it.

“Let me fix this, and I’ll be back to put you to bed. Okay?”

Lola nodded slowly. I walked to the rack in my closet, which was where I kept the

tissues, too, and I pressed one to my nose as I leaned back. Lola was watching me to make sure I

stayed alive, and Danny glanced over from time to time with a vacillating scientific interest. The

blood came freely and reddened out every corner of the first few tissues. I had to remember not

to do coke during winter time. This was likely to happen even when I wasn’t snorting.

When he got bored enough, Danny walked over and reached into my trash can. “They

make squishing sounds,” he said, and squeezed on a tissue paper to let some red drip out of it.

“Danny, stop!” Lola cried and hid her face.

When she started a fit, she was uncontrollable. “Honey, it’s okay,” I said. But it was a

wasted effort. I was still darkening each tissue until it was sopping wet. My fingertips were red

and the stains were growing towards my knuckles. I looked like I had been doing finger-painting.

“Danny,” I said. “Would you hug your sister?”

He shook his head and dropped a tissue into the wastebasket. It fell with a thud. “I want

to watch another movie,” he said.

“Well, then, do me a favor and give your sister a hug. Show me you’re a good boy.”

“I don’t want to,” he said.

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“Then no movie.”

Begrudgingly, he walked over to Lola and put his arms around her. She shoved him back

and he hit her in the face. The tears were spraying now. Her whole face was scrunched. I told

Danny to go back in the corner by the radiator, which he did happily, and I kneeled down in front

of Lola, who’d only offer me one, tear-filled eye from behind the mask of her little hands. “It’s

not scary,” I said. “Remember when Alice goes to the Queen’s garden?”

She nodded.

“Well, look.” I held out one of the tissues, and she stared at it. I crumpled it into a

roughly cup-like shape. “It’s one of the paper roses.”

Lola looked fascinated and scared at the same time. She didn’t seem capable of resolving

what I’d just said with what she knew the tissues to be. Her mouth hung open and a tear stalled,

frozen, on the edge of her cheek.

Just then my phone rang again.

“It’s Mommy,” she said, breaking out into a smile.

Jane wanted everything during our divorce, and she got nearly all of it. That winner-take-

all attitude carried into other things she did, like phone conversations. She could make anything a

competition. “Are they being good?” would often take on the implications of “They’re better for

me.” “When are you putting them to bed?” sometimes sounded like “Why would you do it

then?” There was always a better way, and it was her way.

I picked up the phone, and she asked how things were going.

“Fine,” I said.

“You sound stuffed up.”

“Just a little cold,” I said. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Are you sneezing?” This was Jane’s primary fear, the splash of one person’s spit on

another’s face. AIDS, cancer, venereal disease—all of it was communicable by a chuff. Y2K

probably started with a sneeze.

“Nothing like that, no,” I said. “Just a stuffy nose and a small headache. I’ve got the kids

using hand sanitizer, and I’m sitting on the bed while they watch a movie. I think we’ll probably

have a little ice cream to celebrate how good they’ve been.”

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“Well, good,” she said. “Although I’d skip the ice cream. I don’t want to have to reward

them for the way they always behave for me.”

I swallowed deep and let that one go. I could hear Eric flipping channels in the

background. They were probably in some motel in between training sessions for the world

Olympics of backstabbing and fucking. It was a multi-part event, like the triathlon. One day, I

hoped to represent my country myself. “Do you want to talk to the kids?” I asked.

“No, I’m sure they’re fine,” she said. “Just tell them Mommy loves them.”

She clicked off the phone without saying goodbye, and I turned back towards their

expectant faces. Lola’s hair had gone from a mess of fly-aways to a wet cap from her tears, and

Danny was shoving a toy car into his left nostril, presumably to see if he could do Dad’s trick of

incessant bleeding. I told them, “Mommy says she loves you and wants to hear you went to bed

on time.”

They chose to watch The Princess Bride again, and I let them. My headache waned and

my nose stopped bleeding after a half-hour, and I went back to copying phrases out of the fall of

Rome book. They watched the movie, just as transfixed as they were for the first viewing. When

it came time for bed, I tucked them in and told them I just needed to get dressed in the bathroom,

and then I’d join them.

“Dad, where are you going to sleep?” Lola asked me. Danny was pretending to snore. I

could see his eyes open just a millimeter to check on my response to the question.

“I’m going to sleep on the floor,” I said.

“No, sleep in bed with us,” she said. Danny rolled over onto his stomach and spread his

left arm over to cover the narrow space of the mattress where I could fit.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m comfortable on the floor.”

I went into the bathroom and washed my face and tried to avoid the mirror again. My age

was starting to show in the wrinkles around my eyes and sometimes I was tempted to turn into

Lola, crying at the sight of myself like I’d seen a ghost. I dredged the faint taste of blood from

my mouth with some Listerine and wet my hair and watched the beads of water roll down my

nose, down my lips, down my chin, and drop into the faucet where they spiraled into the drain.

It was the day before my birthday. That’s why I had been thinking about my grandfather.

This was the kind of thing my therapist would call, “Having your subconscious send you a

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message.” Tomorrow, I would be thirty-one, which was the age at which my grandfather started

taking Stelazine, an anti-psychotic, to battle his schizophrenia. My mother had told me about this

only after he had died, when things went south with Jane and I had started to show, as she put it,

“warning signs.” To me, warning signs belonged on bridges, letting you know there might be ice

ahead. Waking up crying was a notice from God that you weren’t going to make it. It was an

invitation to indulge your melodramatic side, because unlike every teenager who said the same

thing, you meant it. I had wanted to die. The only complication was my memory of my

grandfather. He laughed louder than anyone I knew. He talked bigger. He made it a point to

celebrate each moment with a knowing glance or an arched eyebrow or a dig that he knew you

understood was harmless because what made us unique and flawed were blessings. How the fuck

did he do that?

Danny was faking sleep, and Lola was teetering on the edge of consciousness. I closed

the door behind me quietly and tiptoed to the middle of the floor, to a warm patch in the vicinity

of the radiator. I stayed quiet and breathed slowly and listened to the floorboards creak as the

temperature dropped outside. Muffled footsteps above us gave the room a sense of enclosure, of

protection, like this was a chrysalis and we didn’t have to believe there was anything else outside

of this room.

After a half-hour, the kids were still stirring. I asked if they were okay. Danny mumbled

he was cold and couldn’t get comfortable. Lola said she just wasn’t ready yet. I asked them if

they wanted to hear a song, and they said no, and I said, “I’ve got one called ‘Go to Sleep,’ and

you can tell me if it’s any good, because I don’t yet know myself.” My throat closed as I spoke. I

picked up my guitar, and my hands started shaking. Their little eyes were fixed on me, and as I

started strumming, my fingers became stiff and resistant. The only point I took comfort in was

that the song was made up of three chords that rotated slowly. Easy to play. When my voice rose

up, beginning the story of their mother cheating on me, it sounded shrill, even panicked, when it

was supposed to be lulling.

The children’s eyes opened as I sung about “my wife’s bobbing head” and the appearance

of my best friend naked in my bed. They looked down when I got to the second verse and tried to

hit a high note, soft enough not to bother my roommates, on the line “when I look at my second

life, I am soaring.” I closed my eyes, and I let the feeling shudder down me. I knew it was

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inappropriate, but I let myself cry. And when my hand struck the strings and no sound came out,

I wasn’t surprised. I looked, and Danny was standing in front of me, muting the guitar with his

small hand, which laid on the strings firmly.

“Let’s go to sleep now, Dad,” he said and got back in bed.

I put the guitar down and huddled with them under the covers. I knew they would tell

their mother about this, and I needed to think about my own version of the story, what I would

say if she asked about me handing my daughter a bloody tissue and calling it a rose or crying as I

sang a song about her infidelity. They were smart kids sometimes, smart enough to recognize

pain and to be scared by it, and even though they were only six, they would know their father

was a problem in their life and not a solution. I needed to think quickly and to say something that

would make it all right.

What came into my mind instead was a memory, a real one, of the time I showed my

grandfather my guitar. I had quit my team and drained my savings account to buy a concert amp,

a full stack that was larger than my grandparents sitting next to one another, and they came into

my house out of a sense of curiosity. They had never heard of someone giving up his dream to

settle for another equally difficult career that he was not qualified for in the slightest, not

educated in, and beginning at a time in his life when most people would consider him too late.

They crowded into my room and sat down on my bed, and I turned the volume to “1.” I

strummed, and even “1” was too loud for them. I turned it to the halfway mark between “1” and

“0,” and the sound came out clean and faint, and I played them the first song I’d ever written—

just four chords repeating over one another without any words, not even a melody. And the notes

were pinched, and my fingers were unused to the pressure, and the song was pretty but

inconsequential. They waited until I stopped, and my grandmother said she liked it. And this is

what I thought about as I laid in bed with my own children: because he would never lie to me,

my grandfather said, “It’s sad, and I wish I could hear your voice with it.”

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

David Rodriguez grew up in Metairie, Louisiana. He graduated from Loyola University, New

Orleans with a B.A. in English with a concentration in writing. Two weeks before Hurricane

Katrina, he moved to Cleveland, Ohio with his wife. They remained there as their families

temporarily left New Orleans and joined them up north. Two years later, David entered the

M.F.A. in Creative Writing program at Florida State University, which was a life goal. He will

move back to New Orleans with his wife once he has completed work for his Masters degree.