Death by Pop Rocks and Pepsi

DEATH BY POP ROCKS AND PEPSI:

STORIES

ADAM M. ROUNICK

Bachelor of Arts in English

Cleveland State University

May 2014

submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree

MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN CREATIVE WRITING

at the

NORTHEAST OHIO MFA

and

CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY

May 2018

We hereby approve this thesis For ADAM M. ROUNICK Candidate for the MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN CREATIVE WRITING degree For the department of English, the Northeast Ohio MFA Program and CLEVELAND STATE UNIVERSITY’S College of Graduate Studies by

______Thesis Chairperson, Imad Rahman

______Department & Date

______Michael Geither

______Department & Date

______Robert Miltner

______Department & Date

Student’s date of defense April 11, 2018 DEATH BY POP ROCKS AND PEPSI: STORIES ADAM M. ROUNICK ABSTRACT Death by Pop Rocks and Pepsi: Stories is a collection of fiction tackling

everything from the darkness hiding behind the sunny facade of the suburbs, to the

desperation of criminals, and the long-term effects of a steady pop culture diet on the

psyche. All of the narrators and characters are struggling with their unhealthy coping

methods for loss, denial, or failure.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………. iii

CHAPTER

I. EMBERS OF ALVIN WOODS………………………………….. 1

II. JUST LIKE OLD TIMES………………………………………… 20

III. CONFESSION ROULETTE……………………………………... 42

IV. FIRST RESPONSE……………………………………………….. 52

V. NOT GONE………………………………………………………. 64

VI. THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO THE MAGIC 8 BALL…… 66

VII. MICE IN THE ATTIC……………………………………………. 71

VIII. UGLY HOMES…………………………………………………… 86

IX. THE LACY LAVENDER THONG………………………………. 88

X. RELATIONSHIP BAR TRIVIA………………………………….. 104

XI. THE COUCH AND PAULY SHORE…………………………….. 109

XII. JOJO THE SIGN-LANGUAGE GORILLA ABDUCTED BY

DELUSIONAL TRAINER………………………………………... 120

XIII. THE INTRUDER / THE TARGET……………………………….. 123

XIV. WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR……………………………... 131

XV. POP THOUGHTS…………………………………………………. 133

XVI. HIS STORY IN THE DUMPSTER DESK………………………...143

XVII. AFTER KURT…………………………………………………… 151

CHAPTER I

EMBERS OF ALVIN WOODS

Newman stuffed a handful of lighters and candy bars from an empty checkout aisle into his pocket and sprinted for the automatic doors. I guess I had to follow.

We hopped onto our bikes, which we left unchained in the rack out front, and took off pedaling as fast as we could. Threats and cursing from the employees chasing on foot faded outside the parking lot. Cutting through backyards, riding over the well- manicured lawns and flowerbeds of Meadow Ridge, our quiet suburban hometown, we avoided main roads undetected.

When we slowed, we were back in our neighborhood and pouring with sweat from the smoldering summer heat wave that had cracked down over the last two months.

It had been even longer since there was any rain.

I didn’t shoplift anything myself, but I wished I had bought a bottle of water.

Newman was used to feeling the sticky graphic of a tattered black Metallica concert t- shirt clinging to his body on days like this. I was still learning.

“Let’s go to the Alvin Woods.” He darted in front of me and slammed on the brakes of his bike, purposefully trying to make me fling headfirst over my handlebars. I swerved and planted a foot on the ground to keep balance.

“Come on, man,” I said without an ounce of authority.

“Keep up, fatso.” He tried to lure me with a Twix in front of my face like he was fishing.

In the transition to middle school the year before, all of my friends got on the soccer team while I didn’t make it past tryouts. This meant they might as well have been in different schools in different districts in different cities in different counties in different states in different countries on different continents on different worlds of other galaxies.

The first day back in classes, when it came time to pick partners for biology, I didn’t have anyone else, so somehow I ended up with Newman. And then since I didn’t have anyone else anywhere else, somehow I ended up with Newman everywhere.

My parents didn’t see how someone like me, who had never gotten a detention or anything less than a B minus, had anything in common with the kid who got kicked off the wrestling team for getting busted with pot and knew all of the local police officers on a first name basis.

The Alvin Woods was an unofficial title – it was just the who-knows-how-many acres behind Alvin Elementary School on Park Lane. It’s where kids would sometimes ride dirt bikes on shoddily made ramps; where they’d spend hours playing paintball, or shooting off BB guns weaving between the oaks. Some of the big kids would go there at night to get to third base with girls and drink booze they took from their busy, working parents’ liquor cabinets.

My older sister once told me about a gang that lived in a shack inside the Alvin

Woods. They slaughtered a rabbit as a sacrifice to Satan and hanged the bunny’s corpse, sans fur, from the jungle gym on the playground – she said that’s why they got brand new

2 equipment when she was in the third grade. But by the time I reached fifth grade, there was a different legend surrounding the woods: an escapee from an asylum was hiding in a secret cave near the outskirts watching the kids play during recess just waiting, picking and choosing who he’d drag in to cannibalize. I always figured these were just stories, but I never took any chances.

“Can we just hold on for a second?” We’d reached the grass field in front of the school’s entrance and I was out of breath.

I was used to a sedentary life of sleepovers where I’d try to marathon all of the

Star Wars saga with Andrew Davis, Zeke Cohn, and Jasminder Patil. We always ended up getting halfway through one before turning it off and trying to find those five seconds of clarity on the scrambled porn channels the cable didn’t carry. But Andrew, Zeke, and

Jasminder now had the soccer team to do all of that with, and I was stuck with Newman.

“Come on, fatso. Keep up.” Newman hopped off his bike and started to walk it over the dusty softball diamond behind the brown brick gymnasium. He unwrapped one of the candy bars he stole and shoved the melting chocolate into his mouth, smearing a stringy layer of sweets across his lips and fingers. “Did you see the thing last night about

Bradley Donner?”

“Did they find him?” I was relieved that Newman had stopped antagonizing me long enough to treat me human.

“Nah,” he said with a mouthful of caramel. “His mom was on the news again though. Crying and shit.” Newman began to mock her, letting out long, exaggerated, howling boo-hoos. “She said there’s a big reward now for anyone that knows anything.

Pretty sick, right?”

Bradley Donner had been missing for three weeks. Newman, who took the same bus as him, said the kid was a weirdo. “One of those piss-pants bug collection freaks,” he’d once described him as. When he said this, I was glad I had gotten rid of my own bug collection the year before and that Newman didn’t know me in first grade when I missed my bus and wet myself.

I’d only ever seen Bradley Donner’s face on fliers stapled to telephone poles across town and on milk cartons, but I had seen the news the night before. Both Mr. and

Mrs. Donner made desperate pleas with wet mushy faces for their son to be returned home. My parents watched it while we ate dinner, every commercial break trying in vain to figure out what it was that I did all day after sleeping in past noon and staying up until dawn. My answers were always the same: I did nothing or I don’t know.

I didn’t want to hear them tell me again about how I should call up Andrew and see what he’s doing, or dance around the idea of going to see that new action movie with

Zeke, and I didn’t care that they ran into Jasminder’s mom at the supermarket.

“What do you think happened to Bradley?” I asked.

“Who knows?” Newman reached into his pocket and grabbed another candy bar.

He tossed one to me, and even though I wasn’t hungry, I stopped walking to concentrate on getting it open, careful not to make as much of a mess as he had. I always hated being sticky, getting my hands dirty.

“Maybe he uh, what do you call it when somebody just like, explodes?” Newman asked.

“Spontaneous combustion.” I bit into chocolate peanut butter and could already feel what little moisture was left in my mouth evaporate.

“Spontaneous combustion, yeah. Is that real?”

“I think so,” I said.

We stashed our bikes in the tall grass, avoiding the sporadic spread of poison oak and ivy at the opening of Alvin Woods. It was a challenge getting inside, but once we broke past the initial maze of narrowly spaced thorn branches, it wasn’t so bad. Newman left a trail of plastic wrappers in his wake. When he found a thick stick lying on the ground, he picked it up to crack against the biggest trunks he could find for no other reason than to be heard. The aggressive echo hurled itself out into the open air and tried to escape.

The woods were different than I’d imagined. They looked like every other patch of wildlife I’d ever seen, but larger. Squirrels and chipmunks fled up bumpy bark and down hidden holes to get out of our way. There weren’t any Satanists or deranged cannibals. It wasn’t so scary; it was peaceful.

“Could you imagine that shit, dude?” Newman hopped over the creek that ran down the sloping pathway. “All of a sudden you’re just like, I don’t know, sitting in Taco

Bell or something, eating a Crunch Wrap, and then all of a sudden it’s like…” He arched back into a baseball swing to knock one out of the park and shattered his new toy to sawdust against a half-submerged boulder. “Ka-boom! We’ll see ya.”

Chirping birds fluttered their wings overhead to get away from us. Newman pitched the fragmented handle as hard as he could like a tomahawk into some weeds. “I wish I could do that during class. Have Mr. Hotchkiss call on me, right? He’d be like, he’d be like, ‘what’s the photosynthesis of the moon’s orbit?’ And then I’d go to say the answer and I’d be like, ‘uh well, Mr. Hotchkiss, I think it’s’ – boom!” Spit flew from his

5 lips as they curled over his braces to make a cartoon explosion sound that turned to flatulence. He was already growing a mustache and I barely had hair under my arms.

“Yeah,” I did my best to pretend his noises were funny. “That’d be hilarious.”

“He’d never see it coming. You think it like, explodes out your guts and organs and stuff, too? Like is it like smashing a watermelon?” Newman bent down on the other end of the boulder and began to inspect a long-legged spider crawling as fast as it could over moss. He blew on the fleeing creature, the tornado gust of his breath rolling it onto its back, and then quickly up and onward like a trooper across a battlefield.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Never really thought about it. Maybe you just kind of fold in on yourself and don’t leave anything behind.”

“That’s no fun.” Newman chased down the spider and grabbed one of its legs, holding it up in front of his face.

“What are you doing?” We were deep into the woods, deeper than it felt like we should have been, to the point where we couldn’t see outside anymore. It got darker; the sun couldn’t shine in those parts. I watched as the spider thrashed, trying its best to push off of Newman’s filthy thumb and index finger. If it was biting Newman, he didn’t react.

It felt like I was the one at his mercy, pinched and powerless.

“Let it go,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because.”

The only time I ever saw Newman be tender with something was his morbidly obese tabby cat, Nathan IV, who would lay sprawled out at the top of his driveway at all hours. Newman would be strangely gentle with his touch and overzealous with treats; I

6 even heard him use a baby voice to speak to it once. A coyote ate Nathan III, and when

Newman found the blood-spackled furry aftermath on the side of his house, he skipped school for a week.

I didn’t have a reason that I could say out loud without him teasing me for why I thought he shouldn’t do something horrible to the spider. Unless it was an alternate solution that led to more chaos, he didn’t care. Maybe he would’ve listened if I’d suggested we bred it and unleashed the swarming horde out onto the soccer players during practice.

It was best, I learned, to just pretend I was cruel like him because when I tried to tell him why I couldn’t just go into my mom’s purse and take twenty bucks for us to buy fireworks he looked at me blankly. When I tried to find a cool way to say why I was hesitating to sneak into R-rated movies, or how nervous it made me to lie to a teacher saying I had to go to the bathroom when really we’d just wander the halls and miss the entirety of history class, he told me to stop being such a pussy. It was better to just go along with whatever it was that he wanted than to hear the name-calling or be that kid who ate lunch alone.

In a desperate act of self-preservation, the spider snapped off one of its legs and parachuted with a soft thread of web to the ground before Newman noticed. My heart skipped a beat in elated celebration. The spider hid beneath a leaf, but Newman overturned it and snatched it back up. “Watch this,” he said. He took one of the lighters he had stolen and held it beneath the frantically flailing arachnid.

With a flick of his bitten fingernail, the flame shot out and engulfed the spider whole causing all seven of its legs to immediately bunch up and curl toward its blackened

7 abdomen. I swear I could hear it scream a distant, high-pitched death rattle. I could feel the temperature rising. Newman let it drop back to the leaf and crunched it under his foot like it was one of his cigarette butts. He grunted a laugh.

“What’re we even doing in here? Let’s go.” I tried to look for the spider but couldn’t spot it from all of the other nature around. It might have still been on the sole of his Converse.

“What’s your deal? Are you scared or something?”

“No.”

“Then chill out.”

“I just want to know what we’re doing out here. It’s hot out. Too hot.”

“What else do you do in the Alvin Woods, man?” Newman turned around and started kicking at stones. He looked for me to finish his thought, but I didn’t know how.

“Burn some shit.”

A sinking feeling started in my stomach to meet halfway with a slither coming up my throat. I remembered how I hadn’t told my mom where I was going before I left, how

I’d slammed the door behind me in a huff, annoyed that she’d asked, that she’d said she just wanted to make sure that I didn’t go missing like Bradley Donner.

Newman built a little pile of brown dead leaves and lit the center so we could see the flame build and spread outward. The glowing orange edges parsed to the perimeter before finally coming to a halt where the ground was bare. It erupted faster than I thought, likely due to the drought, and Newman made sure to stomp away at anything still shimmering before moving on. There were plenty of dry things to use for kindling, so he assembled another pile while I stood with my hands in my pockets supervising.

“All right, it’s your turn now.” He extended the red lighter out to me, but I didn’t move. I felt like I might throw up if I did.

“Nah, that’s okay. You go ahead.”

“Come on, fatso,” he said with a whine. “You never do anything. It’s always just like, me doing all of this shit and you watching.”

“I like to watch.” I shrugged. In my head, I could still reconcile that I wasn’t a bad kid because I never personally did anything, I just watched Newman do it. It was never me throwing rolls of toilet paper on that old guy’s house on the corner, it was Newman. I just tagged along and ran away when he came out screaming and swinging his cane. All of the thrill, none of the guilt.

“It’s time to stop watching and do something.” He tossed the lighter at my chest.

Of course, I missed it.

The Bic felt massive in my hands once I picked it up. I tested out the spark wheel twice before it clicked that I needed to hold down the lever to keep it going. A vague smell of smoke still lingered from the heap Newman had charred, and a faint ghost trail of grey rose from the ashes. My thumb stung from the gruff metal tearing at it, and the heat coming off the flame made the agitation worse. Still, under the judgment of

Newman’s expecting eyes, I tapped the center of the fresh dead pile with the glow and watched the first leaf trigger the rest.

Bile built as the miniature inferno reached waist height. “I’ve got to go take a leak real quick,” I said.

“Jesus, dude. You’re going to miss it.” Newman snatched another lighter from his shorts as I passed. “I’m not going to wait to build another.”

“That’s fine.” I tried to keep my composure as I walked away, stuffing the red lighter in my pocket and swallowing with every step. When I was far enough from him so he couldn’t see me, I ducked behind a tree and leaned against it to heave but nothing came out. Breathing in deep, I fixed my posture straight and tall to feel some form of relief. I wondered what would happen if I just left without saying another word.

Andrew, Zeke, and Jasminder were probably across town in a scrimmage practicing their footwork and ball control with their new cool friends, #6 Pete Trachner and #21 Tim Whitman. Coach Kash, who shook his balding, disappointed head at me during the tryout after I shot wide of the unmanned goal, was likely blasting his shrill whistle and demanding they hustle, hustle, let’s go ladies, pick it up.

Closing my eyes, I pretended I was passing the soccer ball to Zeke, who shot it to

Andrew, over to Jasminder, then back to me for a perfect bicycle kick into the open corner the goalkeeper couldn’t possibly block with his mistimed dive. The crowd went wild as Zeke, Andrew, and Jasminder hoisted me on their shoulders.

When I opened my eyes again, there was a tree house.

It had been there before, but it was well concealed with so much foliage shrouding it in the boughs above. There weren’t steps made of spare boards nailed in to get up there, like other ones I’d seen, the only way up was by scaling the trunk until the branches could help the climb. I was not the type of kid with upper body strength, so I took a few steps back and tried to look into the doorway. There was definitely someone inside; I could see their muck-encrusted white Velcro tennis shoes.

“Hello?” I called out, but didn’t see them move.

“What?” Newman yelled with mild concern, letting his voice get swept away into the distance. With no response, he came and found me a few seconds later. “What’s going on?”

“Look,” I said pointing to the hut. “I think there’s somebody in there.”

“Oh shit.” Newman got excited and found a small rock he could throw, whipping it skyward like a grenade. “Hey, who’s up there? I know you’re in there. We can see you.

Come out.”

“I don’t think they’re coming.” I started to walk away. “Let’s get out of here. I need something to drink. It’s like two-hundred degrees.”

“No, wait a second.” Newman grabbed my arm to hold me back. “Hey, if you don’t come out of there we’re coming up, dude.”

“Newman, I can’t climb up that tree. I’m not Spider-Man.”

He punched me on the shoulder and I could already feel a bruise buried amongst the immediate swelling. “Shut up. They don’t know that.”

“They don’t know that I’m not Spider-Man?”

After a little bit of rustling, we saw a shaggy head pop out of the window and peer down at us. “Go away.”

My fears of an escaped cannibalistic psych patient or a satanic cult disappeared; it was just some other kid like us.

“Oh shit,” Newman said. “I know who that is. It’s Bradley Donner.”

Newman found another stone and hurled it as high as he could to hit the side of the tree house. It plunked off and nearly hit me on the head. “Hey Bradley, it’s me:

Newman.”

“Newman?” He repeated. “Go away. I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

“We won’t tell anybody. Just come down here for a second.” Newman leaned in close to ask me: “Are you ready for that reward money? Just do what I say.” I didn’t know what he meant.

Bradley Donner came out onto the ledge at the opening of the tree house and unfurled a rope ladder. “Seriously, Newman. Don’t tell anybody I’m living up there.”

His clumped light locks were thatched together with patches of mud, his clothes were scratched up, and it looked like he’d been using the runoff waters of the grimy flowing creek to bathe. Though his knees were scraped and his hands were calloused from climbing, he seemed happy and healthy aside from lots of mosquito bites.

Contrary to what everybody in Meadow Ridge thought about the missing boy,

Bradley Donner, he wasn’t snatched up by a sleazy predator in a white van and he didn’t run away from home to join the circus, nor was he beamed up by aliens, or eaten by alligators in the sewers when he chased a stray baseball down a drainpipe – he was just living in a tree house in the Alvin Woods.

“You know everybody’s looking for you, right?” Newman asked.

“Yeah, I know.”

“So what are you doing up there?” I asked.

“I don’t want to go back to school. I hate it there and I never learn anything. It’s stupid.” He looked me up and down but didn’t bother asking for my name. There was a tinge of shame in his voice as he started to shuffle his feet. “They said I have to be held back.”

“Who cares? I’ve been held back a couple of times.” Newman reached into his pocket and took out a candy bar. “You want this?” It was uncharacteristic of him to share anything and I couldn’t help but think about the time where I’d seen him offer up a whole can of tuna to Nathan IV. The fat cat had purred under his touch.

“Yeah, thanks.” Bradley devoured the chocolate faster than I’d ever seen anyone eat anything before. It gave him a new shade of matted brown on his cheeks and fingertips. “I’ve been pretty hungry.”

“What are you even eating out here?” I asked.

“I packed a lot of stuff but I just ran out. I think there’s like a day care or something that they’re running inside of Alvin Elementary now that it’s summer.” He paused to lap up the residual crumbs on the wrapper. “So I’ve been digging through the dumpster at the back of the school at night for anything they threw out.”

“Gross,” I said.

“Do you guys have any more?”

“Nah, that’s my last one.” Newman shrugged his shoulders. “You know that your parents are like, on the news every night and – ”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen the fliers and stuff. I’ve heard people talk about me out here, even saw a few people looking. But they don’t think to look up.” He smiled and pointed to his fortress. “I snuck out here and built that with some of my dad’s tools before

I ran away. You’d never know it was there.”

“You made that?” I was surprised by how good it looked, considering the circumstances, but I could tell it wasn’t nearly as stable as it needed to be. He’d assembled it out of chunks of bark that had fallen to the ground, clusters of sticks, and a

13 hodgepodge of nails, screws, and planks. It looked like shelter built on a deserted island, and it was just a matter of time before it came down.

“Yeah, my dad’s a carpenter and I help him. We build things together,” Bradley said with pride. He had an obvious talent.

“Grab his legs,” Newman said. He rushed Bradley and put him into a side headlock, immediately causing the runaway to kick and flail his limbs, letting out sharp strained gasps. “Grab his legs, fatso. Come on.”

“What’re you doing?” Bradley cried. “Let go of me. Let go of me, Newman.”

My feet felt like they were sucked into the ground, and the nausea bubbled back.

Newman kept wrenching on Bradley’s neck, trying to force him into submission, and staring at me with those same wide, waiting eyes as he’d had over the leaves.

“Come on, dude. Don’t just stand there,” Newman said.

It didn’t occur to me to question what Newman expected us to do once we captured Bradley. There was no way to drag him back to town on our bikes. If he wanted to tie him up to keep him in one place we’d need rope, unless he wanted to knock him out like they do in movies. Knowing Newman, he probably just hadn’t planned that far ahead.

It didn’t matter, because though I tried to help, I ended up getting in the way when

I couldn’t hold onto Bradley’s bucking right leg. Newman stumbled over my clumsiness and sprawled out onto the ground, hooking my foot and sending me over on top of him.

Free of our stronghold, Bradley pulled himself up the wobbling ladder to safety before we were able to dust ourselves off.

“I hate you, Newman,” Bradley said.

“Get down here now, or I’m coming up there.”

But Bradley just picked up his dad’s hammer and made sure we saw. Newman screeched with rage, his whole face turning the same bright red as the lighter in my pocket. He kicked at the trunk of the tree as if his toes could hack the flecks of bark away until it brought Bradley back down.

“Come on, Newman,” I said. “We can tell his parents and they can get him.”

Newman took the rope ladder, and for a split second, he seemed to weigh out the likelihood of climbing the tree and disarming Bradley of his weapon before he was bludgeoned on the head. But Newman must not have liked his chances, because he instead grabbed the rope tight and wrapped it around his fists, leaning back and pulling until the tethers nailed to the floorboards gave way to his strength.

“There,” Newman’s face returned back to its normal shade as he chucked the severed limp bridge to his feet. “Now if you want to stay in the tree, Bradley, you’ll stay in that damn tree.”

I tried to peek at whether or not Bradley was crying, but I couldn’t tell since he backed into a corner with his knees tight to his chest. “I don’t know about this,” I started to say.

Newman’s face dropped as if he remembered something he’d forgotten. “Oh shit…” He turned his back to me and took off running just as fast as he had from the store with his camouflage shorts pockets loaded. “Oh shit.”

I guess I had to follow.

We didn’t even need to make it back to where we started for me to realize what he was freaking out about – I could smell the suffocating sting of the fire singeing my

15 nostrils like I was the marshmallow roasting at the end of a stick. The neat little piles of leaves he’d heaped were each their own pyre, seeping into the fallen canopies splayed out on the earth and ascending up the dead, termite-ridden husks of old trees toward the sky.

Even though we were outside, the thick, heavy smoke hung low and blackened our lungs.

The only way to exhale was through chest-caving coughs.

“Shit,” Newman screamed. “Oh god, this is – ”

“We’ll never be able to put this out,” I pounded my heel against a portion that got near, but had to give up. When I turned to see what Newman thought we should do, he was already over the creek and disappearing from view. I guess I had to follow.

I was never as fast as he was. I couldn’t keep up. Like in a horror film, I tripped over a root as if it reached out to keep me in the Alvin Woods to pay penance for what we’d done. Newman was nowhere to be found when I got back up and I didn’t know if I was even going the right way. The ground didn’t have a trail of candy wrappers to follow, but I figured that if I just kept going straight I’d reach some form of civilization eventually. My thighs scraped, the arches of my feet stabbed, and the sweat bit at my eyes. This sort of thing never would have happened if I’d made the soccer team with

Andrew, Zeke, and Jasminder; I’d be running on the green grass of the field, I’d be surrounded by friends that would never abandon me.

By the time I hit the thorn barrier holding me back from the rest of the world, I didn’t bother to cautiously step through. Each sharp point was like a lash across my skin, ripping at my black shirt with skulls on it. Newman’s cool exterior had dropped, he was bouncing back and forth with his fists trembling as he looked into a different part of the woods, I assumed for me.

“Newman.” I wheezed, but he looked at me then right back between the trees. He was trying to see how far the fire had gotten, how much trouble he’d be in. He gave up watching and jogged over as I collapsed to the grass to inspect my wounds. We could see the dark thundercloud of smoke marring the blue of the sky. Giant logs soon toppled into each other, upturning their roots to shake the world. The Alvin Woods was burning down fast.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know.” He coughed.

“Why didn’t you stomp it out before you left? This never would have happened if you’d been more careful.” I sounded like my dad.

“Shut up.” He went toward our bikes and picked his up.

“You’re just going to leave? We have to tell somebody, or we have to go back in there – I mean, what about Bradley?”

“Yeah, you go ahead and do that.” He swung his foot over to straddle the pedals.

“I’m getting out of here, man. I do not want to be here when the cops show up. I’m not telling anybody about this. I was never here. We were never here.”

Inside of the shadowed gaps that looked into the Alvin Woods, I could see the same flickering of light that Newman was monitoring growing brighter. Like tendrils, the tips of the inferno tried to rekindle with the sun. I cried the whole way home, my clothes no longer reeking of summer stale body odor, but of soot and sin. Heading in the opposite direction several streets over were the shrill wailings of sirens and horns. In my pocket, the red lighter felt heavier than the world.

***

A few days later, after they’d sifted through the ashes, they made an announcement on the news. My family sat around the television eating dinner, watching filmed footage of firefighters from seven neighboring cities battle to contain the blazing catastrophe. It looked the same way I’d imagined it in my nightmares from the few evenings where I’d actually gotten an hour of sleep.

Authorities reported that they found what they could now confirm to be the remains of the missing child, Bradley Donner, and though the investigation was still underway they linked the cause of the fire back to him. Mr. and Mrs. Donner couldn’t be reached for a comment. I couldn’t bear to eat another bite of the barbecue chicken prepared for me over the black grate of the grill.

A candlelight vigil was hosted at Alvin Elementary for Bradley at the end of the week. It was the first time I left my basement, the air-conditioning, to hang out with

Newman again. I covered my cuts with layers of dark clothing. Newman pretended like nothing happened, making mocking faces while Andrew, Zeke, Jasminder, and the rest of the soccer team presented Mr. and Mrs. Donner with a sizable donation they’d managed to raise in a fundraiser for the Bradley Donner Memorial Scholarship Fund.

I didn’t know how Newman could stand amongst the silent sullen faces painted with the halos of their melting wax without feeling like he was tied to the stake. Or, how he could look at the large, last ever yearbook photo of Bradley’s uneven smile without wondering what his final moments were like. Did Bradley try to jump down and escape, snapping his legs like twigs, or did he wait until the fire climbed up to get him? Did his tree house sanctuary come crashing down on top of him? Were his cries for help the last thing he heard, or was it the sound of his father’s tools catching and crackling?

“Let’s get out of here,” Newman said. “This is lame.” I wanted to ask him the thing that I’d been haunted with every moment since: if he’d remembered to stamp out the pile I’d set, or if it was one of the ones he’d lit after I walked away that grew out of control. But I realized it didn’t matter.

I followed Newman.

CHAPTER II

JUST LIKE OLD TIMES

The detective called to say he was closing the home invasion murder investigation of my wife and daughter. I wanted to go to the station and strangle him. This same man had looked me right in the eyes as I stepped off the plane and gave me his word he’d find who was responsible. Someone was at fault. Someone had to pay for what they did. But when I got into my truck, I found myself heading in the opposite direction of the station, toward The Rodeohouse to drink with Mark.

“Sergeant Last, I want to assure you it’s not over,” the detective said in the voicemail, “it’s just there haven’t been any new developments. We’ll open it again if there are, though. My best advice to you is to try and move on. I know that’s easier said than done, but if you –”

Mark slammed my phone so hard that it shut off. Beer foam thick as spit slimed its way down the rim of the glass into his mouth. “I can’t listen to anymore of that crap,

Timmy.”

I’d met Mark at boot camp and we became fast friends once we found out that we both grew up within the same tri-county area of Texas. It’s a small world. Even though we probably missed one another years ago at a diner or a movie, we found each other

20 thousands of miles from home in uniform. We went all the way to war and back. Bonds like that were unbreakable.

“I hate civilian life,” Mark belched. He didn’t like being around people anymore.

Honorably discharged, they allowed me an early release from my deployment to arrange the funerals for Rebecca and Anna. We didn’t have any family or friends to do it for us. The craziest thing was, when I got back to America I wanted to tell my superiors I needed to go back to battle. I wanted to tell them thanks to Rebecca’s life insurance policy, all I had to do with my time was spend it imagining what my wife and daughter’s final moments were like in the very space it had happened without me. As much as I wanted to go back to the service, I knew I was no good to anyone with my head and heart buried six feet deep in side-by-side plots in Texas.

“It makes me sick knowing he’s still out there,” I said as I dissected peanut shells and swept their chipped husks to the floor. “Thanks again for coming out. I’ve been trying to talk to somebody about this, but the VA can’t get me in any sooner than next year.”

“That sounds about right.” Mark banged his palms against the bar and held up the peace sign. “Two more.” The bartender obeyed the order. “And the cops haven’t been able to find any of your stuff in pawn shops, either?”

“No,” I said.

The man that broke in that night took everything you’d expect: computers, televisions, phones, cash, and jewelry. Rebecca’s wedding ring was wriggled from her rigor mortis fingers after they shot her and Anna in the living room. They’d been watching a Batman cartoon just before bedtime. At some point after killing them

21 execution style, the home invader discovered the Christmas presents hidden in our bedroom closet. The last letter Rebecca wrote to me overseas said she wrapped them in shining green paper with red bows on top. She couldn’t wait for my tour to end so I could come home to celebrate the holiday with them for the first time since Anna had been born. Christmas morning was supposed to look like a Hallmark card.

“I was the one supposed to be in danger, not them,” I said over the wailing country music blasting from the jukebox. I was drunk enough it looked like all of the pictures of cowboys on The Rodeohouse walls were moving – their horses kicking up dirt, their bulls bucking between their legs, their six-shooters smoking – so I dug my thumbs against my eyes until it felt like they might come out the other side of my skull.

“I was trying to protect them from bigger things. I thought they were safe here.”

Mark wasn’t listening. He was looking for a fight. “You got a problem, buddy?” he called out to a group of five college kids that looked like defensive linemen, or wrestlers. When I heard them loudly walk in I could tell Mark was eyeing them up. Kids like that reminded him too much of who he used to be.

The collegiate athletes, though bigger, faster, and younger than both of us, didn’t bother to get up. They averted their eyes to their nail beds and murmured under their breaths that maybe they should find another place to go. I could see the veins pulsing in

Mark’s forearms, creating a web around star-spangled stripes and bald eagles tattooed below his elbow. He wanted to test our reflexes, the hardened muscles under our flannel shirts and denim that we’d earned in basic training.

“I hear you, Timmy.” The Rodeohouse stools could collapse if you leaned too far on one side or the other, so when Mark took his seat, it groaned beneath him. “This whole thing’s messed up. If it were me I’d –”

But I hadn’t said everything I wanted to. Something had been bugging me for weeks and I had to get it out. I had to try. “I just wish they’d put a little more pressure on that one guy.”

Mark raised an eyebrow. “Which one?”

“The one I told you my neighbor, Rob, picked out of the lineup. The one they went and questioned who had an alibi.” But I could see it wasn’t ringing any bells for

Mark. There’d been lots of suspects who had come and gone that I brought to his attention over the last year. Mug shot photos I’d shown him. Leads the police were following that they told me to leave up to them. “The black guy with the record.”

And that’s when I could see it landed because Mark blew out his sudsy breath like he was trying to inflate a balloon. “You think it was him?”

“They said he was with his kid at home.” I scratched my beard that had now grown past my collarbone. If Rebecca were around she’d have made me shave it the second it started scratching her cheeks. She’d probably say: you’re going to give me rug burn. But I liked how it’d started to streak grey and made me look like someone I didn’t recognize. “They didn’t think it was him.”

“Timmy. That ain’t what I asked.”

I watched beer bubbles pop next to one another in a honeycomb cluster at the edge of the glass. Mark lowered his voice and capped his hand over my shoulder; the heat coming off of him was palpable, as if he were on fire. “Tomorrow you meet me at the

23 range so we can talk about this.” And then he limped over to the jukebox to put on Glenn

Campbell so he could sing the loudest and longest until the bartenders told us The

Rodeohouse was locking up.

***

Wearing overhead earmuffs and yellow tinted safety glasses, Mark and I unloaded round after round into human silhouette targets a few yards away. We both had half of our gun collections with us and we took turns cycling between big, small, and everything in between. Our fingers slightly stained silver with gunpowder residue, the air reeking of explosions, the atmosphere electric, and for a brief moment everything was right with the world. As we went to reload, the smoke cleared and we found ourselves whispering even though no one was around.

“So about this guy,” Mark said as he scalped the top of a package of bullets. The sun blared out of the blue cloudless sky to cast a passing flock’s shadow over the dusty gold farmland. It looked like a sign from God, an arrow-pointing north to proceed.

“Which guy?” I pushed a cleaning rod through the disassembled barrel of my rifle and then held it up to my eye like a telescope. All clear.

“The guy you told me about last night that you wished the cops had investigated.

The one your neighbor picked out.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I was just talking. I wasn’t serious about none of that.”

But I was.

“I know you. You wouldn’t have said nothing if you didn’t mean it.” And Mark was right. I watched the birds shrink over the hills. On the other end of the property we

24 could hear shots fired. “If they won’t do anything about this guy, maybe you should,”

Mark said. “Maybe we should.” Wrinkles rippled across his forehead above his goggles.

“What’re you saying?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer. It was exactly what

I was hoping he’d say, because I couldn’t.

“Like the old days,” Mark said. “You have my back, I’ve got yours.”

“They’ve already talked to him –”

“Timmy, you and I are Marines. We talk to people a little bit differently.” Mark slid a new clip in and cocked back his pistol. He shuddered at the satisfying clank.

“Remember all of the talking we did over there? We got plenty of answers without ever saying a word.”

I could never forget. I remembered the way all of those people looked at us as we walked down their streets, judging us as if we wanted to be there. I remembered the day when a little boy dressed in rags tried to sell Mark an apple. We all laughed at how the kid wouldn’t take no for an answer, his grubby hands clutching at Mark’s bulletproof vest, distracting him from the dirty bomb rigged around the corner. Mark said when he was doped up in the hospital that he remembered seeing the flash outline shine around the child’s features just before he dissolved, entirely obliterated. I remembered Mark’s screams and the way they sounded as blood boiled up the back of his throat to give him the same gurgling sobs that my daughter Anna had when she was a newborn. I remembered.

Mark never used crutches or a wheelchair. He kept his Purple Heart in a box in his attic and wore a metal prosthetic that looked like he pried it off a Terminator. It had a knee that bent and everything. Mark got to come home to nothing way before me and he

25 opened a gym and spent all of his days training like he was trying to enter a powerlifting competition, like if he put on enough muscle he could regrow everything. He never spoke about it, no matter how many five dollar pitchers of Budweiser were spilled, no matter how many times I found him crumpled drunk in The Rodeohouse bathroom, or on the sidewalk out front, or behind the wheel of his red pickup as he serpentined over the yellow dashed median lines.

“At the very least,” Mark fell into stance with his weapon. You couldn’t even tell he shifted his weight to his real leg. His weapon popped until empty. “We can see if we can find any evidence that the cops couldn’t find.” Holes manifested at the center of the target’s chest.

“And if he is?” I brought my stock to my shoulder and felt the sudden steel slam.

In front of me, the paper rattled, curled, and frayed all above and around the shadow silhouette’s forehead like a halo. The splintered wooden post it was stapled to bled a puff of sawdust. Mark was always the better marksman; I was as skilled a shooter as a chimp with a sniper. “They can’t use none of that evidence in court.”

“We can’t count on these civilians to do anything,” Mark said. “You have this guy’s name?”

“Darnell Owens,” I said.

***

Rebecca wrote to me by hand because she said it was more personal. I still carry the letters around in my pocket, the creases folded over so many times that I’m afraid to unwrap them in case they tear apart. They were always mundane, filled with updates of

26 everything I’d missed, and accompanied by photos of what her and Anna were doing. I always looked forward to them.

Rebecca’s second to last letter she wrote when I was overseas said she took Anna to Wal-Mart to look around at the toy aisle. Anna found a motorized kid-sized Batmobile she fell in love with. Attached to the letter was a colored cutout ad from the paper touting it was for kids aged 3-7, with Bat-Traction wheels capable of driving on hard surfaces, wet grass, and rough terrain. It also boasted a 12-volt rechargeable battery that could propel the sturdy frame five miles per hour forward and two-and-a-half miles per hour in reverse.

“You believe that?” I said as I ran around showing off the letter to the other guys at base. “How badass is my little girl?” Other little girls might’ve wanted a Barbie Jeep or a Princess Porsche, but my little girl, my Anna, just wanted to be Batman.

We started to save up for Christmas. With all of the gadgets they put inside stuff now, it’s expensive to be a kid. I remembered seeing some little boy whipping down our street in a yellow motorized kid-sized racecar. It went pretty fast for a Fisher-Price toy. It was around the time Rebecca and I had just moved into the neighborhood, which the realtor assured us was so quiet we wouldn’t even need a security system.

“Could you imagine if you had one of those as a kid?” Driving back from the grocery store, I took Rebecca’s hand. Her belly, with Anna floating cozy inside, had bulged out to nearly knock against her slim knees. The night before she had been complaining her stretch marks made her feel ugly. We never got a chance to get fat and saggy together, to have more kids, and spoil our grandkids.

The boy in the kid’s car tried to race us, his eager glances to the side and determined glares forward cracked us up, but he couldn’t keep pace. “My parents never could’ve afforded that when I was growing up,” Rebecca said. She did an impression of an old woman. “Back in my day we had to pedal with our feet like we were Flintstones.”

She brought the back of my fist to her soft lips and pressed them to the hard cabled tendons coiled below my knuckles.

“Things will be different for her,” I said as I pulled up the driveway. “She’ll have everything we only dreamed of.”

That Christmas morning was supposed to be magical. I couldn’t wait to see the look on Anna’s chubby cheeked face when she tore open the sparkling green wrapping paper and saw the Bat logo on the side of the box. I’d reach over and kiss Rebecca’s neck as she filmed the whole thing. I’d say: “We did good.” And: “I love you.” I couldn’t wait.

It was what kept me going when I was lonely overseas, the last thing I’d think about before I went to sleep and the first thing I’d think about when I woke up.

It still was.

***

I spent a small fortune on top of the line surveillance equipment that Mark and I were going to plant at the perimeter of Darnell Owens’ house. Around midnight, Mark pulled up in a dented, corroded, rusted piece of junk that looked like he’d rescued it from a demolition derby. There was no license plate on the front or back.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked as I slid in to the passenger side. The seatbelt didn’t budge as I tried to strap in and Mark laughed at the effort. He handed me a cup of coffee he’d picked up from a gas station. It was already stale.

“We have to look like we fit in,” he said as he drove us deeper and deeper into the city. The past two weeks he’d spent planning were the happiest I’d seen Mark in a long time. He always had a mind for crafting out missions and I was only good at taking orders. “Can’t use our own vehicles.”

“How much was this thing? I’ll pay for it,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it.” Mark took his eyes off the road for a second, and even though it was dark, I could see he winked at me. “Didn’t cost me a cent.” I swallowed the last of the cold coffee, the bitterness making my stomach turn. I dug my thumbnail into the Styrofoam to make frowning pained faces.

We had to learn Darnell’s routine. He lived on the border of a bad neighborhood where children ran through the streets in nothing but diapers, and men spent their days sitting on the sidewalks begging for change. “It’s just like patrolling the streets in the

Humvee,” Mark said as we passed unfriendly faces mugging from a porch and sipping from open containers after dark. “I never thought people would look at us like this back here, too.” I did a little digging and found a place just down the street that had been abandoned after a DEA raid. It seemed like the perfect place to set up base.

When we pulled up to the next street over from Darnell’s, Mark popped the trunk and started pulling out duffel bags and cases. I didn’t know what was inside and I didn’t ask. I grabbed all of the cameras and motion detectors, the microphones, and monitors. It was just a little hike through a backyard, but my heart was racing as we stayed low and kept our heads swiveling. Sirens sang in the distance, but not that far off. We got to the backdoor of the place and found it cordoned off with caution tape; the screens on the windows hanging off and riddled with holes.

Inside, everything was pitch black, but I saw Mark perk up as he led the way. The hair on the back of my neck spiked up like an extension of my vertebrae as Mark raised his fist into the air to signal hold. There was someone else waiting, it wasn’t empty like we’d thought. Mark didn’t make a noise as he lowered his bags to the ground, and I started to do the same, but mine had loose equipment and the rattle spooked the whole house to chaos.

Mark clicked on his flashlight, which I saw was fastened to the barrel of his pistol. We never agreed to bring our weapons, but I guess it was implied. The beam cut through the house over loose floorboards with jutting nails and rotting cushions on furniture that had been overturned. In the corners of the living room, like roaches, were mangy looking squatters.

“Woah, please, please we didn’t –” an ashy man without teeth mumbled.

“Police. You’re all trespassing. Get out of here. Now.” Mark spun the light around to the others – eight in total – all strung out and dirty and shaking. As they started to scramble to their feet and scamper away on their knees, blinded when they tried to make eye contact, Mark shook his head in disgust. “I’ll handle this. You go set up your tech. I won’t be much help with that anyway, that’s your specialty.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, but I wanted nothing more than to get out and I didn’t wait for him to answer.

I tried not to think about how Mark would make sure the junkies wouldn’t tell anyone about us being there as I crouched down and plugged in each camera and tested the microphones I planted near the front stairs. Darnell’s lights were on inside, but I couldn’t see him moving past his windows. By the time I was finished, I came back to

30 find Mark alone, unpacked, and running a miniature war room lit with small lanterns that wouldn’t give away our location.

The monitors were in front of the handheld generators waiting for me to run. In the corner where I saw the man without teeth begging, using a piece of torn wallpaper as a blanket, there was a dark pool of something shining. I didn’t know what it was or if it had been there before, but I kept away from it. We had work to do.

***

On one of our first dates, after I’d made up my mind about enlisting, Rebecca and I went to a sports bar to watch a football game. We weren’t even old enough to get a drink, but for some reason, I remember they gave me one. She told me once we’d ordered a platter each of traditional wings – garlic Parmesan dry rub for her, buffalo ranch for me – that she had a certain theory about compatibility.

“If you can stand watching a guy eat a plate of chicken wings, you can be with him forever.” She fumbled with her silverware, later she told me it was because she was so nervous. Her track record with dating never was great.

Me, being as shy as I was, managed to make her laugh with, “I don’t care how good I see a guy eat a plate of wings, it ain’t going to make me want to be with him.”

Using the napkin she’d wrung like a towel as a whip, she swatted at my forearm.

“Stop that. You know what I mean. It goes both ways.”

“Why’s that? Where’d you get this idea from?”

“I just did. Because wings are messy, they’re gross.”

“I don’t think wings are gross. Why’d you get them if you think they are?”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s just a messy food to eat. It’s so primal with ripping the meat off the bone and it gets all over your face. Some people have weird habits when they do it, like they pick at their teeth or suck on the ends to get the sauce off.”

When our food came, we both pretended not to watch one another eat. I don’t think, until I’d been in a firefight with someone that didn’t speak a lick of my language, that I’d ever been so nervous and wanting to do the right thing. I was on my best behavior, careful not to look like a savage slob. Somehow she made her meal look effortless and polite as she made sure there wasn’t a tiny bit of chicken left behind or a spilled splotch on her cheeks or shirt. At the end, I picked up the tab with the little money

I had to my name, and she took my hand as we went to my pickup in the parking lot.

“Well?” I asked. “Did I pass your chicken wing compatibility test?” That’s when I knew she was the one.

***

Weeks dragged by, and if Darnell Owens so much as took out the trash or checked his mailbox, Mark and I were aware of it. We would tail his used Buick if he left and take pictures from a distance when he worked the night shift – 1700 to 0500 hours, five days a week – at a storage facility as a security guard. Every other weekend he had custody of his little boy, who was around Anna’s age, around the same age as the kid who tried to sell Mark an apple. Had things gone differently, maybe Darnell’s son would’ve been a classmate of Anna’s or a boy she pushed down in a McDonald’s ball pit.

Darnell let the kid play in the driveway or the sidewalk directly in front of the house. His son was not allowed to set foot elsewhere without supervision, and for good reason. There were bad people out there. When the boy’s mother would waddle back to

32 retrieve him on Sunday night, gesturing wildly at whomever she was screaming at on her cellphone, she’d get into arguments with Darnell over alimony and child support that threatened to blow out the microphones we had aimed at the house. It would all be to the persistent background noise of the kid crying, and then we’d watch her drag the ragdoll child by the arm down the porch steps and out of our world.

Mark and I didn’t speak to one another during surveillance unless it was necessary. We communicated in silent gestures and expressions as if we could read each other’s minds. But if he had any idea what I’d been thinking, he might’ve given up, and if

I knew what he was thinking, I’d probably abandon everything. We survived off canned food and prepackaged snacks and bottles of domestic light beer. Since there was no running water, we got creative with the bathroom, which didn’t help with the smell that already haunted the place of burning plastic and sour milk.

“You know,” I said after I’d been thinking for a long time. Watching the tiny screens and listening to Darnell sleep all day, as he usually did, left me lots of time for that. “If anything happens, and I’m not saying it will, there’s a chance they might find out it was us.”

“It probably was this guy,” Mark said. “Trust your gut.”

“I have a link to this guy just because he was a person of interest for them.”

Mark didn’t take his eyes off of the feed of the backyard, there was a feral cat stalking an unsuspecting bird pecking at a cigarette butt. “The cops won’t find us. After we do it, we split up for a while. Nobody would blink at you, an honorably discharged veteran who just lost his family, wanting to sell the house and make new, happy

33 memories elsewhere. I’m going to leave the gym with Eli and open a new location up north where my sister lives.”

“If it’s this guy,” I said. “I need to make sure I’ve got the right guy.” But Mark was almost certain, even if he didn’t show us anything. Darnell had a history of breaking and entering, of theft, of trespassing. The only thing he hadn’t served time for was murder, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable. In each of his mug shot photos he had a distant, glazed, unremorseful expression. It looked like he was taunting me, it looked like it was snapped a second before it shifted to a smile that bragged: I got away with it and there’s nothing you can do about it.

A man strolled in front of Darnell’s house that caught our attention. He was walking his gray pit-bull and the dog sniffed at the bushes near where we’d planted equipment. Green swirls of tattoos covered the guy’s arms, shoulders, neck, and sides of his shaved head. Mark got tense and instinctively reached for his holster. It wasn’t until the guy was halfway down the block before Mark let go of his gun.

“I just need you to know that there’s a chance they still might find us. It’s one thing to scope out the house. It’s a whole other thing if it gets more serious. I can’t ask you to do none of this for me. You might face prison time,” I said. It’d been all I could think about.

“No,” Mark said.

“Yes. There’s always a chance, no matter how –”

“I’m not going to prison.” Mark said.

And I understood what he meant. I wouldn’t go to prison either.

I traced along the decaying edges of the letters Rebecca sent me in my pocket, her handwriting gone starburst in some places where the ink got wet with my sweat and tears.

Those looped words she scrawled started to look like black and blue fireworks.

Inside, Darnell was waking up to go to work.

***

It was easy to get discouraged when we had so few developments break. Darnell was boring, unassuming, and looked less and less like our guy. But Mark never doubted it for a second. He had already made up his mind.

We sat together in the next lot over from the rentable storage units Darnell worked the security gig at. He’d wander around wearing a belt with a flashlight and a radio once an hour to make sure everything was quiet, and it always was. Every night we ever followed him, we never saw a single other person come to the area. Sometimes,

Darnell would nap or watch television in the office.

Mark insisted we sit without any music in the car. I wasn’t even sure if the demolition derby car could function enough to get a signal. When I’d start to hum to myself a song I used to sing to Anna, Mark would just rotate his head and the look in his eyes would be enough to tell me to knock it off.

It occurred to me that Anna never got a chance to know me, and I never really got a chance to know her. I wasn’t there for the final month of Rebecca’s pregnancy, I only read about the labor in a letter, and the first time I ever laid eyes on Anna was on a glitchy webcam stream that froze and crashed right when Rebecca held her up to show me. The little thumbnail image was grainy, but I could tell that the bundle in her arms was ours. In person, I only spent a few months total with Anna. Everything she knew

35 about me she learned secondhand. Maybe she even forgot about me since I was never there. I could’ve walked through the front door and been a stranger to her, someone she wouldn’t feel comfortable stumble running up to and throwing her little arms around my leg.

I wasn’t there for her birth, I was barely there for her life, and I missed her death.

But I stop myself from thinking like this, because when I start crying I can tell from

Mark’s expression – the same one he gives me when I start humming – that I need to cut it out. If Anna could see me now, what would she think?

***

Mark insisted we visit The Rodeohouse when we finished our stakeouts so we could get a few servings of hot wings, watch whatever game was on, and add our findings to our files. After more than a month and a half of going through Darnell’s trash, we still didn’t have anything conclusive. At The Rodeohouse, we’d drink until we needed to go home and sleep it off. When we woke up, the stakeout started all over again. We threw a tracking device on Darnell’s Buick and decided to stop following him to work, using his shift as our break.

“I appreciate your help, Mark. This whole thing hasn’t been easy for me,” I said after a long day where the only new information we had found out was that Darnell ordered sausage and mushroom on his pizza. “And I know this ain’t your battle to fight, so if you just want to call this whole thing off –”

“Hey look,” Mark slurred. At the corners of his mouth he still had dried red sauce from his wings that he somehow missed when he savagely slurped them down. “Look,

36 look, if you’re in a fight. Let’s say you’re in a fight, okay? I’m fighting in that fight right behind you. I’m right there, man. I’m always looking for a fight.”

“But if anything happened to you, to us, I guess I’d feel responsible. I’d feel like I was the one who got you into –”

I thought Mark might have started crying as his shoulders shook and he held his hands like a mask, but I should’ve known better. When he pried them off, I saw he was laughing hysterically. Something about the way his face scrunched up or the gape of his crimson stained mouth made me think the only thing he was missing was his helmet and a fountain of blood to make him look exactly the same as he did when the bomb went off.

“Just stop, man. What do I have to lose? Huh?”

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have an answer. It was why he was perfect to help.

“Come on. I mean really, come on, this is the most fun – this is the best – the most fun I’ve had since before my balls got blown off over there.” He kept laughing. “I’m serious. I missed this. I’ve been itching for it for a long time.”

I ordered another round. “And I appreciate that. I knew I could count on you.”

And I meant it.

Mark raised his fresh glass, slightly wobbling so it spilled over the sides and oozed over his fingers. “Your family is my family. We don’t have nobody else. Here’s to

Rachel and Annabelle.”

“Rebecca and Anna,” I said.

Mark laughed so hard that he started slapping at his prosthetic leg. It sounded like bullets ricocheting off a tank. I had to laugh, too.

***

We got impatient and Mark was at the end of his rope.

“Nothing is going to get done if we keep waiting around like the cops,” he said as he stood up and started to pace, kicking at a bunch of crushed beer cans we’d stacked in a pyramid. “We’re not getting what we need from the outside looking in. We’ve got to get in there.”

Darnell had left for work in a hurry after a phone call he took while he played rap music with a pounding bass line that obscured everything on our equipment. “We can set up some stuff inside,” I said as I pulled open another bag. I strapped it across my chest and Mark was so excited he didn’t wait for me to slip out the back.

Once we broke the lock, we checked every room of Darnell’s house. He liked superhero movies and marijuana. His one-floor, squat dwelling was filthy with greasy pizza cardboard, candy wrappers, and crumbs of every kind exploded over the floor.

Nothing looked out of place except for the expensive home theatre setup that was well beyond the means of a minimum wage guard.

“That’s all the proof I need,” Mark said as he checked the kitchen. “He did it.”

“I don’t know,” I said as I went through drawers with my gloves and flashlight. I installed a microphone underneath a shelf. “If we could find something of mine, something he took so that I could be sure we got the right guy…”

“He’s not going to keep any of it.” Mark peered out the curtains. “He probably pawned it for the giant speakers over there. Movie theaters don’t even have screens this big, Timmy. What more evidence do you need?”

All I found in the end table drawers were rolling papers, cough drops, a grinder, remote controls, empty plastic bags, and discarded Black & Mild packaging. Picture frames on top of the furniture showed Darnell and his son. In one, they were at the zoo outside the elephant exhibit. Behind the smiling, sweating, stubby child was a fence with several massive, stone skinned, prehistoric looking monsters baking in the sun. Darnell, heavyset, droopy lidded, and gap toothed, had his arm slung over his son’s shoulder, both of them looking so alike that they resembled future and past versions of the same person.

On the corner of this was where I installed a camera.

“What if it wasn’t him?” I asked. I wasn’t naïve. I knew, had seen, that anyone was capable of anything if they believed in it enough. Appearances could be deceiving. It was hard to tell who the bad guys were sometimes. “We’ve got to find his gun or something.”

“Look at him.” Mark examined my placement of the zoo photo device. “This guy just looks like he did it.”

I scratched my beard and wiped my eyes. I was so tired of all the late night surveillance, the all day binge drinking, the dreams where I’d be convinced that everything went back to normal and I could hold Rebecca again and hear Anna’s laughter. It hurt to wake up and remember.

“This is only recon for info. We’re not doing anything tonight, no matter what,” I said.

The pictures on the sticky end tables bordering the cigarette burned brown floral sofa made me think about the same ones I had in boxes: Rebecca and Anna sitting on a picnic blanket in the grass, Anna in the bathtub swarmed by soap bubbles, the three of us

39 happy together. Before the police dropped their investigation, I put the house up for sale and moved into a motel. Whenever I had to leave town, I figured I’d go to Minnesota – where I’d once considered going to college for engineering, before I enlisted. Who knows how things might’ve gone if I went there, joined the National Guard, and held off on marrying Rebecca right out of high school. Minnesota was as good a place as any to pick up the pieces.

“What do we have to find to make you sure?” Mark asked.

I imagined Darnell’s son finding out that a man had broken into his father’s home and shot him dead in the living room. I imagined the kid growing up to look just like

Darnell, and every time he looked in the mirror he’d see his dead father’s face.

A thud in a closet we hadn’t opened yet drew our attention, and reflexively, both of our barrels were drawn and locked onto the door. Since I was closer, I slowly stepped forward and counted to three on my fingers before I reached to pull it open. Mark had my six.

It was a toy closet for Darnell’s son. Spilling out onto the floor with a loud crash was a small army of action figures, a basketball, football, baseball bat, plastic light-up lightsabers, squirt guns, and a motorized kid-sized Batmobile. They all rolled to a stop, but the heavy car had knocked to its side, the wheels in the air lazily turning. It was just like the one Anna had wanted, just like the one Rebecca had wrapped with green paper and topped with a red bow, just like the one taken in the home invasion.

Headlights bore through the windows and Mark dropped to his non-existent titanium knee. “He’s here.”

At night in the barracks, on a cot just slightly better than the ground, I used to imagine Anna driving around in the Batmobile we bought her, the black plastic picking up mud, tiny engine whining as she peeled around sidewalk corners and thunking on every uneven pavement bump. I could picture it as if I were sitting on the front porch with Rebecca, the two of us listening to cicadas in the trees, a synchronized nod and wave

– so precise it looked practiced – to our neighbor Rob as he mowed his lawn. My tears had a way of making everything dizzy when they found their way to my head. My palms clenched so tight around my pistol’s crosshatched grip that I wasn’t sure if I’d even feel my index finger squeeze the trigger.

Mark was hidden in the shadows, grinning. His metal leg squeaked when he shifted his weight. I saw his eyes flicker to mine, and just like old times, I knew that if I weren’t the one strong enough to get the job done, he’d be there. After all, that was why

I’d brought him along in the first place.

The lock rolled and the knob jiggled, then spun. Up close, Darnell and his son looked different than they had in the photographs, different than they had from behind the safe distance of my monitors or the cracked windshield of the demolition derby car, which was waiting for us down the street. But I could picture him on the other end of a gun, busting through our front door, ordering my shrieking wife and scared child down to their knees. His flat feet dragged as he stepped behind them, ignoring their pleas to take whatever he wanted, to just go, not to hurt them. I wondered who Darnell made go first, who got to feel the cold muzzle placed to the back of their skull while the other watched.

I know what I would’ve done.

CHAPTER III

CONFESSION ROULETTE

Bernie the Weasel and Wiseguy Randy drank until their chins drooped to their chests and their tongues turned to sandpaper. They didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders, so they made an agreement to clear their consciences and go out on their own terms. What else were marked men supposed to do?

“Another?” Bernie the Weasel asked. He already knew the answer, so he uncapped the bottle and poured. His hands were steady and reliable only when it mattered, like when he was talking to cops or saving every last drop of alcohol. He wished he had control over his body, over his lips, over his secrets, the same way he did when he had less to lose.

Wiseguy Randy leaned back in his wooden chair and rubbed his dry eyes with his palms. The interrogation had been hours of questions and threats of lost decades, hard time spent behind bars. He’d rolled over before he even knew what the detectives were doing, played right into their trap. He was scared before, but now that the adrenaline wore off it left him sluggish and groggy. The booze didn’t help. He’d never had to square up with pressure like that, never had to deal with that level of authority. That was his excuse, at least. Bernie the Weasel didn’t have one.

The busted blinds of the safe house the police had assigned to them kept out most of the light in the nearly empty apartment. A blue neon sign of the neighboring strip club slid through the slats to project a pattern on the bare wall. Every so often, a cockroach or rat scampered in a corner. Wrapping around the table and chairs they’d been glued to for hours was pounding pop bass and howling laughter that clashed with sirens and horns on the street. Witness protection wouldn’t be able to save them after what they gave up. No one could.

Their glasses clinked and it sounded like a tiny bell. “An angel gets their wings,”

Wiseguy Randy said. Their faces no longer contorted with the taste. After refilling, they stared into their glasses at their sepia mirrors.

“Is this stuff expensive?” Bernie the Weasel asked.

“Yeah, it’s expensive.” Wiseguy Randy didn’t see a need to absolve them of guilt for overindulgence. There was no point in pretending there were consequences anymore.

They brought all of this onto themselves.

“You don’t mind that we’re…?” Bernie the Weasel’s words trailed off and vanished from his mouth before he could speak them. He knew he was going through the motions. There wouldn’t be a tomorrow to care.

“No, no. Drink up. What’s a few more dollars?” Wiseguy Randy raised his glass and waited for Bernie the Weasel to drink. Underneath the table, Wiseguy Randy slid his heels from his patent leather loafers and wiggled his toes.

Bernie the Weasel laughed and cuffed the sleeves of his dress shirt. “That’s the spirit.” They watched each other unsure. This was all Bernie the Weasel’s idea. “Ready?”

Wiseguy Randy swallowed and nodded. His eyes landed on his lap to his fidgeting fingers. Bernie the Weasel pulled out the revolver with the serial number scraped away. It went to the center of the table with a heavy thud. He poured another shot while Wiseguy Randy inspected the weapon, tested the weight, felt the cold metal, the crosshatched grip. He lingered on the sight, aimed it to the termite-ridden board on the floor that squeaked.

“This thing is practically an antique.” Wiseguy Randy unloaded five of the bullets, leaving one in the chamber. He set them down like game pieces on the tabletop. It was a bridge, a row built between the two, a straight-line cast out from one sinking ship to another.

When the gun went back to the table, they clinked their glasses and sunk them back. Bernie the Weasel rotated the gun on its side like a twisted version of spin the bottle. It landed on him. “Guess I’m starting.” He poured new drinks and scooped up the revolver, swiping the barrel hard and fast under his palm to let it click into a random spot.

Wiseguy Randy couldn’t help but think it sounded like a baseball card ticking in the spokes of a bike tire. That used to be a status symbol when he was a kid. He used to love that noise. Bernie the Weasel thought it sounded more like his grandfather’s old gold pocket watch that he inherited and kept in the top drawer of his dresser. The gun settled and Bernie the Weasel took his time tracing along the ridges and grooves he encountered on his way to switching off the safety.

“Good luck,” Wiseguy Randy said. “I hope it’s not you.”

“My mom had this yellow bird named Sunshine that she loved.” Bernie the

Weasel scratched his hand. “But it hated me. She used to put the cage outside, all closed

44 and covered, so Sunshine could feel the breeze. One summer, my mom decided Sunshine should spend the night outside to soak up the stars. That next morning, I woke up to her screaming and crying. There was blood and feather and bone everywhere. The bird had been shredded, devoured.”

“Did an animal get to it?” Wiseguy Randy asked.

“A cat. A neighbor’s cat, we were pretty sure, since they left it outside all of the time. It was this big, fat, black thing that’d make loud, feral love with strays outside our windows. It’d lay a litter under our porch every spring, but we never did see kittens for long. We figured she ate those, too. Cats do that, you know.” Bernie the Weasel thought about the red-checkered pattern on his mother’s old apron, the one she wore when she baked banana bread. He wished she were here to offer him a steaming slice now and to tell him that everything would be all right, that the bad men wouldn’t come hurt him.

“My mom took Sunshine’s death real hard. I hated to see her sad.”

Wiseguy Randy was afraid to ask, but he knew he had to because it was what he’d want. It was only fair. “So what’d you do?”

“I found the cat. And I found an old hammer in our tool shed, too.” Bernie the

Weasel’s face got hot, his ears reddened. “I just wanted her to be happy again. I was only a kid. I didn’t know any better.” He couldn’t speak anymore, but he could lift the gun to his temple. He didn’t let it rest there long before he gripped it tighter until he found the trigger.

Click.

Nothing.

They exhaled with relief, said cheers, drank, and refilled. Wiseguy Randy reached over and picked up the gun while Bernie the Weasel knocked over one of the bullets resting at his elbow. It rolled in a semicircle before it slowed, stopped.

One down.

Wiseguy Randy said, “You just reminded me that there was a real weird kid named Gene that lived on my street. He used to skip to school humming, you know, one of those weird kids. And also on my street, there was an older kid named Evan who was real mean with even meaner friends. One day while my little brother and I were walking home from school, Evan and his friends came over and started trouble.”

Bernie the Weasel shook his head to acknowledge the word: Trouble. It felt like an old pal.

“I didn’t want trouble,” Wiseguy Randy continued. “I wasn’t a stranger to it, but my brother was. He was too young for trouble, hadn’t found it yet. Evan saw that weird kid Gene walking on the other side of the street and he told me that if I went over and beat Gene to a pulp, he’d spare my brother and me a beating of our own. So what am I supposed to do?”

“You have to look out for your own,” Bernie the Weasel mumbled to himself, as if it justified what he’d spilled to the cops. The damage was already done.

“By the time I’m finished with Gene, his face looked like an oven fresh pizza that got dropped wrong side up. There was blood everywhere – real messy. I didn’t even know the kid, had no reason to hate him, it was just a dog-eat-dog playground sort of thing. Better him than me. And Evan was true to his word; he let us go home safely. But the whole way back, my brother couldn’t even look at me – like he was afraid.”

Wiseguy Randy put the gun to his head and let his socks scrape against the floor like he was running in place. “It wasn’t more than a year later that they found Gene hanging from his bedroom closet with a belt around his neck. My brother and I never talked about it, never brought it up. Too late now.”

He pulled the trigger.

Click.

Nothing.

Cheers. Drink. Refill. Knock over a bullet. He knew the routine now.

Two down.

“My best friend was named Big Tony,” Bernie the Weasel said. “And he was with this chick named Tess. They were horrible together, like oil and water. Big Tony was lazy, unmotivated, and unfaithful. Tess was jealous, controlling, and manipulative. He made her crazy, she made him unhappy, they both deserved better. It killed me that Big

Tony felt like he needed somebody to boss him around and tell him how to live his life.

You ever have a friend like that?”

Wiseguy Randy laughed because he had. He might’ve even been that guy once upon a time, but it wasn’t his turn.

“Big Tony could’ve done anything if he put his mind to it and Tess was a beautiful girl who was being dragged down and turned into something she never wanted to be. She didn’t belong with him. They both needed a fresh start.”

Wiseguy Randy snorted and let his head roll to his shoulders. “Sometimes that’s all it takes.”

“We’re out drinking one night,” Bernie the Weasel touched his glass. “And Big

Tony tells me he’s going to propose. After he passed out, I took Tess upstairs. It wasn’t hard to do, and it told us all something we’d suspected for a long time. It’s not that I wanted her for myself; I just didn’t want them for each other.”

Wiseguy Randy loosened his tie. He had no room to judge.

“They didn’t stay together after that. They couldn’t. But I never got a chance to talk to either one again, never got a chance to find out what happened after they were done with one another.” Bernie the Weasel pulled the trigger.

Click.

Nothing.

Cheers. Drink. Refill. Knock over a bullet.

Three down.

Wiseguy Randy grinded his teeth and shook his head. “My father was rotten to the core. There’s that old saying about not letting one bad apple spoil the whole damn bunch, but he was like a plague on my family. He infected everything he touched and ruined anything he so much as glanced at, let alone loved. When he got old and sick, frail, it fell on me – somehow – to look after him.”

“Must’ve been hard,” Bernie the Weasel said. He wished he could’ve watched his own father die slowly.

“Demanding, challenging, absolutely, expensive too. He required constant care and it’s not like I knew what I was doing. I didn’t go to school to be a doctor and here I was stabbing him with needles and giving him pills and cleaning up his messes, spoon- feeding and sponge baths, and at the time I was a young guy. I wasn’t the one who

48 couldn’t get out of bed or needed somebody to change my diapers – that was all him. I never asked for any of it. I kept wondering why I should have to suffer any longer, or why he should too. So I just stopped. I stopped everything. I packed my bags and I ran away.” Before Wiseguy Randy put the gun to his head, he realized his voice had gotten so loud that he’d been screaming at the end.

Click.

Nothing.

Cheers. Drink. Refill. Knock over a bullet.

Four down.

But it took a long time for Bernie the Weasel to break out of his hypnotized stare.

He was lost in the little glimmer and shine of the smooth silver weapon. There weren’t many other ways this could go. Either he’d be next, or he’d die alone. He sighed because he was on the verge of tears and he couldn’t decide if he wanted to say out loud what he’d kept locked up in his head for so many years. “There was one night where my son was sleeping and – ” but he couldn’t, so he shot the gun to his forehead and he let out a gasp and closed his eyes tight to pull the trigger.

Click.

Nothing.

Cheers. Drink. Refill. Knock over a bullet.

Five down.

When the air returned to the room, both men were panting. Wiseguy Randy unlatched his grip on the table; he’d dug his nails into the wood and peeled back slivers of grain without realizing it. He’d be the lucky one. He watched as Bernie the Weasel

49 shook the gun from his fist. They stared at it, then their glasses, and then the five bullets sitting on their sides.

Wiseguy Randy started to laugh and so did Bernie the Weasel because there was nothing else left to do. Their laughter built until they had to wipe their eyes and suppress trailing giggles and woos. Bernie the Weasel dabbed his forehead when Wiseguy Randy picked up the gun, and he couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted to watch. He figured he had to, in order to show respect. Wiseguy Randy put the gun in his mouth, forsaking the rules they’d laid out before they started drinking, and whimpered as if it were somehow out of his power to stop.

He pulled the trigger.

Click.

When the gun came out of his mouth, there was a rope of spittle, but that was all.

They were shocked to silence, stunned into total disbelief. They gasped like they’d finished a marathon, or had been dragged to shore by a lifeguard after drowning.

Wiseguy Randy threw the gun to the table and stood up, knocking his chair to the ground. His legs were gelatin but he couldn’t stop pacing the perimeter. He felt like if he stopped his heart would explode. Bernie the Weasel couldn’t believe the bullet was still lodged in the chamber. He took it out and felt the potential in his palm.

“It jammed.” Bernie the Weasel knew it was an old gun; it had belonged to his grandfather, he’d always kept it in the dresser drawer next to the gold pocketwatch watch.

“Misfired.” He pulled on the trigger a few more times and saw that the hammer never even came back down properly. If they’d been even an ounce more sober, or brave, they’d have noticed.

“Jesus,” was all that Wiseguy Randy could think of to say. He knew he’d never have that courage again.

When Bernie the Weasel stood up from the table he laughed something sad. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. They never planned for this; they never got this far ahead.

Wiseguy Randy reached out to pour another strong one, but the bottle was empty.

They soberly sat back down anyway with their idle hands caressing the shells. Outside, the crackling hum of neon grew. The sun started to rise and both men tried to wonder why they’d been spared a quick and painless way out, but they knew someone, or something, would be coming by soon enough to finish the job. It would be slow and agonizing and deserved. No evil deed ever went unpunished.

CHAPTER IV

FIRST RESPONSE

Patrick looks out the front seat of the ambulance window at the city pulled to the edge of the road and thinks about his comatose sister in the hospital just a few miles away. The blue Camry that he’s speeding towards is an accordion; shattered glass peppers its sides like a ring. There’s a pole splitting it in two that remains unharmed and victorious, standing firm and inconvenienced by the four-wheeled hunk of metal that lost the joust. Dispatch fights to be heard over the static and siren blasting overhead. Bruce swerves in and out of traffic with the lights swirling. Patrick hops onto the radio: “Rescue

1 is en route to Dean’s Way.”

Things always happen fast in this line of work, they always have to be ready. The

911 call came from a frantic witness saying that the Camry just lost control. Sometimes these things happen. Tracy is in the back preparing the stretcher and bags for what they might find.

Bruce pulls up and throws the vehicle into park. Tracy jumps out and wheels the bed alongside Patrick. Just like they’ve all been trained, they take in the scene and get to work. The body lays twenty feet away, motionless. Patrick checks the car as he passes to see if there’s anyone else inside. Empty. One of the three most important rules of the

52 training is spinal precaution, but in a situation like this it doesn’t make much of a difference. The damage is too severe. Tracy helps him turn over the body: a girl. Patrick thinks she might be just a few years younger than his own sister, who is in desperate need of a heart transplant.

“If she were wearing her seatbelt this wouldn’t have happened,” Tracy mutters.

“Probably texting, too.” Her four children are in for another lecture on the subject when she gets off. Bruce tries to stay calm, ignoring what he calls his “Italian Temper” while he shoos away the gawkers. Car accidents are gruesome free sideshows and everyone has a ticket.

The fire truck pulls up to extinguish the nonexistent flames and attracts more gaping mouths and macabre thoughts. Firefighters block off the street and direct traffic, there’s not much else for them to do. From the outside, they look like the glamorous heroes of disaster.

Tracy scribbles down the victim’s vitals on the clipboard while Patrick reaches into the bag and pulls out the transparent mask. He straps it over the girl’s mouth and pumps, struggling to get airflow. Her ribs are cracked and shattered, tearing through her chest and exposing her insides. Behind shredded tissue, sharp bone, and puddles of blood,

Patrick can see her weak, but still present, heart churning. He watches the organ throb from underneath the holes in the lung – it’s just begging to escape. It would be so easy to reach in and take it, and he would if it could save his sister. She’s nearly at the top of the donor waiting list.

Bruce says: “You see those tire marks? She was going way over the speed limit.”

Distracted, Patrick looks back at the black burnt rubber on the pavement leading up to

53 impact. His hands go through the motions of saving her; it’s second nature at this point, but when everything happens at this speed it’s easy to get left behind, so he refocuses.

Saving lives is his job.

The left side of the girl’s face is only halfway there, almost as charred as her arm, which sports a new unnatural angle thanks to unsheathed bone. When she was thrown from her seat she must’ve turned slightly for her fatal surf along the cement. This isn’t anyone’s first call; they’re all veterans who have seen every horror imaginable before.

Knowing when people will live or die comes with the territory. This girl will die. She will not live long enough to see the hospital. Patrick’s sister though, she might be able to live if she could take that thumping fist-sized pump.

The girl starts choking on her own blood. She gurgles sound and vomits incoherent guttural death rattles. Her teeth are broken and mangled and there are more pieces of glass embedded into her flesh than there are stars in the sky. If Patrick squints he can almost see his sick sister’s face in the grotesque trail of the girl’s remains from her slide. It’s morbid but unsurprising – she’s all he ever seems to think about and he’s been seeing his sister everywhere he looks.

Patrick’s the older sibling and he has to watch out for her, especially now that their parents are both gone. She’s his responsibility now; he promised their mother on her deathbed. Somehow he got lucky and avoided the hereditary heart problems that plague their bloodline. First dad, then mom, now his sister, but she’s the only one with a fighting chance.

He remembers something random – a time when the two were much younger and she somehow convinced him to let her put their mom’s make up on him while the

54 babysitter was asleep on the couch. She wanted to make him all fancy for the two of them to play house. She took her tiny hand and patted his face with foundation, creating mushroom clouds of powder on his cheek. Then she drew a smile on his face with lipstick that was large and uneven, somehow managing to get around his lips but in between the cracks of his teeth and on his gums. By the time she went in with the mascara brush, their parents had come home to find the mess. His baby sister pleaded with them not to be mad, she just wanted to make Patrick pretty.

Bruce yells Patrick’s name and Tracy calls it again before he snaps back to the scene and sees that nothing here is pretty. His coworkers have already run away and climbed into the ambulance leaving him frozen on the ground like a statue. Time for a transfer of care – a formality really in this case, they might as well take her straight to the morgue. When Patrick gets back in he uses the radio to inform the hospital they’re on the way and helps Tracy to stabilize the victim.

“I’m en route with what appears to be a twenty-five year old female with severe lacerations, internal bleeding, heavy blood loss, several cracked and protruding ribs, a punctured lung, a shattered arm, likely spinal and skull fractures,” the list goes on and on.

Patrick stops after each ailment hoping Tracy will tell him that the girl is too far-gone and they should stop. She’s not worth saving.

Doctors will have four to six hours to put this heart into his sister. This girl could be her donor. This might be the heart that could save her. Didn’t she deserve it? Hadn’t seen been through enough? Hadn’t Patrick?

Patrick gazes at his watch to find he only started this shift eight hours ago. When he last left his sister’s bedside the nurse told him she wasn’t looking good. She might not

55 have long. He prayed for something like this to happen: a girl like this one might make the biggest mistake of her life and in turn give someone else a chance to not be so careless with theirs.

One day, his sister will find someone she loves and get married, have kids, and both her and Patrick will look back on this time and laugh. His sister’s been chained to that bed, those wires and machines, for so long now it’s hard for him to remember what she used to be like before the thick scar ran between her breasts. Now it’s all part of her.

“Any I.D.?” Patrick asks Tracy. She gives him a look of confusion and disbelief as her gloved hands attempt to hold in oozing organs. He stares at the gooey pieces of the girl popping up between Tracy’s frantic fingers. Other people can use those things, she really should be more careful.

Bruce shouts they’re almost there and Tracy prepares for the girl’s exit. Doctors and nurses are waiting outside to receive her and they throw open the doors to get her out fast. Patrick helps lower the stretcher while the girl’s eyes roll up to look at him one last time – to look at anything one last time. The medical staff disappears through the automatic doors, but one stays behind to talk to Tracy. Since Patrick has a few minutes, he checks in on his sister who is on the fifth floor and leaves Bruce to clean up. Bruce understands.

There’s a heavyset nurse who tells Patrick that his sister might not make it much longer. He doesn’t believe it though, they’ve said this before and she always bounced back. The infallible machines do all of the heavy lifting now; they control the life in her.

The color of her face, the same face Patrick sees when he looks in the mirror has long

56 since changed to a ghostly hue and her body is withered and jagged. Her hair used to be thick, like his, but now it’s stringy and thin.

In the right lighting or angle, it’s easy for him to mistake her for his late mother lying in the bed instead. If he stares too long he can even picture his sister whimpering at her side, holding him close after they pronounced mom dead. His sister’s solemn expression matching his memory of the one she wore at the funeral of his father.

He doesn’t stay in her room for long; he notices a tiny bit of blood somehow leftover under his fingernail from the girl. Going into the bathroom, he cleans his hands of the situation.

Tracy does the paperwork on the way back to the station and Bruce whistles loud in his ear. They both know what happened back there, Patrick spacing out, but they won’t say anything about it. That accident could’ve happened in the hallway of the hospital and there still wouldn’t have been anything more that could’ve been done for the victim. But it’s obvious Patrick isn’t all there. Maybe he didn’t try as hard as he could have; maybe this is just a one-time thing. He’ll do better next call, they’re probably trying to convince themselves, but his head is with his sister and this isn’t the first time something like this has happened.

There’s always a debriefing after an assignment, mandatory within stations across the nation after the rate of suicide and alcoholism skyrocketed amongst EMS and firefighters. The higher-ups are worried about PTSD, bad P.R., but there really does need to be a certain level of desensitization, Patrick thinks, otherwise how could they all live with themselves having seen what they’ve seen? Having done what they’ve done? When

57 a job deals this closely with mortality it becomes a routine because it has to be. There needs to be disconnect with death.

In these sessions everyone has to talk about their feelings and be supportive of one another and discuss what happened and how. Are you okay? What can we do to help?

What could we have done better? None of that helps Patrick. They can’t help him unless they’re able to give his sister a heart. Tracy and Bruce know his situation, they’ve all been working together for years, but Patrick doesn’t buy a second of their phony sympathy. All that he cares about is whether or not the girl in the wreck was an organ donor, and though he tries to phrase it as casually as he can, he fails.

Tracy says that she wasn’t. All of that hard work for nothing.

And it’s another two hours before dispatch tells them they’re needed again. For this call, Patrick drives. Bruce goes into the back to prep and Tracy sits next to Patrick up front. When the radio tells him the address, everyone knows and groans – this is the infamous Mrs. Williams, the seventy-five year old diabetic. She’s what they like to call a

“frequent flyer.”

“Looks like you got the short end of the stick,” Bruce laughs with his booming voice. Mrs. Williams calls 911 at least once every two weeks and everyone in EMS has helped her a minimum of three times. No one can figure out how she affords it all or why she hasn’t learned her lesson. Her blood sugar drops to dangerously low levels, and as a result her mind will go. She never realizes paramedics are there to save her life so she bites, scratches, spits, and kicks like a belligerent child throwing a temper tantrum. Her daughter lives with her and takes care of her; she’s a few decades older than Patrick’s sister.

Mrs. Williams, Patrick knows for a fact, is an organ donor.

Patrick backs into her driveway, he could do it with his eyes closed by now, and follows Tracy and Bruce at a somewhat slower than usual pace. One of the three most important rules of the training is quality patient care – no matter who or what. Still, an audible sigh occurs when they reach the door.

Mrs. Williams’ daughter left it unlocked, so they walk in. On the shag rug of the living room is Mrs. Williams, motionless near the stiff leather reclining chair she spends most of her time in. Her daughter’s crying and hovering over her, poorly administering

CPR as the operator directs her to over the phone. She doesn’t even notice they’ve come in. Bruce runs up and pushes her to the side while Tracy starts to work. Patrick follows behind with the clipboard and writes down what he sees.

But what’s the point?

She’s dead.

He zips up the black bag and loads her onto the cart. The police bully their way in to conduct their investigation before Patrick can step out. Wheeling Mrs. Williams through the front door, he can hear the sobbing heaving of her daughter, now an orphan.

Patrick knows the feeling. She swears she was asleep for just an hour and when she came into the living room to check on her mom, she found her like that. Oh god, oh god. No foul play suspected.

Behind the wheel, Patrick drives Bruce, Tracy, and what’s left of Mrs. Williams to the morgue. None of them are sad. “Well I guess now we don’t have to worry about getting a call from her anymore.” Tracy laughs. Doctors can’t put a heart in that’s been

59 gone this long into another body. Even in her death, Mrs. Williams finds a way to annoy

Patrick.

And just like that, Patrick only has a few minutes left before his standard 24-hour shift is over. This time he’s in the back of the ambulance alone. Bruce rides shotgun and

Tracy’s driving. All Patrick can think about is his sister. He had refused to say goodbye when he last saw her a few hours ago at the hospital because he promised himself it wouldn’t be the last time he’d see her. A promise he intends to uphold.

When she was in high school, his sister threw a party while their parents were away. It was a huge turnout, and when one of her friends spilled a bright red, poorly mixed margarita on the off-white couch, his sister knew she was caught and would likely be killed by their dad. Patrick promised he’d help her clean it in the morning, after everyone left and the party died down. Everything was going to be fine, he promised.

She threw a towel over the spot and tried to have a good time, which she did, but

Patrick stayed up all night scrubbing and washing the cushion to get it back to normal.

The next day when she took the towel off, she was shocked to find it was as if it never happened at all. Patrick told her she imagined it and had worried for nothing. She was so relieved. He didn’t want her to feel guilty about everything he’d been through.

When Patrick steps out of the back of the ambulance with the stretcher, the view of the pile up is overwhelming. Seven cars are connected in a line by dents and damage ranging in severity and the worst ones are the ones in the center. This is way more than the three of them can handle, and Tracy calls for more help over the radio. Bruce runs with Patrick to each car to assess the conditions of the victims. The people in the back

60 two are fine, already out of their cars and walking around. The next three are in bad shape and Tracy’s already checked on the front two and says they’re not a priority.

One of the three cars demanding attention has a mother dead at the steering wheel of her powder blue minivan; her two young children are in the back with erratic breathing. The second car is a smoking silver Oldsmobile with an elderly woman bleeding from her head and convulsing. The final car holds a teenage girl, about ten years younger than Patrick’s sister, crushed by her own red Hummer at the waist. “This is bad,”

Bruce yells.

“We’ve got to split off until the other guys arrive,” Tracy orders, because in a situation like this, they triage. Patrick takes the girl in the red Hummer. She’s conscious and functioning, fine aside from the flattened abdomen. Her brown hair is glued to her face with her own blood and her hooded sweatshirt is bunched up and tattered where the car divides her. A thin stream of crimson runs down her lips and bubbles when she calls out for help. She keeps screaming, oblivious of her shock.

“Can you hear me?” Patrick asks her. She tells him that she can. “Are you in any pain, ma’am?” She tells him that she isn’t. Her hands are outstretched like she’s reaching for something invisible beyond where the windshield once was. Behind the stain on her chest he can make out the logo of the local high school’s mascot, a stallion, bucking on its hind legs. Her lower half is confined in a scrap metal cocoon, pinned by her door, draped with her airbag. There’s a look of terror and serenity in her gaze and even though she’s looking right at Patrick it’s like she doesn’t even know he’s there.

She won’t make it.

Bruce and Tracy are busy with their people; Patrick can already hear sirens approaching in the distance. The living dead girl shouts for her mom and dad.

Everything is under control, but the only way Patrick could save this girl is if he went back in time to stop the crash from ever happening. They don’t teach them how to do that in the training. He tries to stop the blood; he tries to keep her calm. He thinks he should say something that might help settle her so she doesn’t twist or move and pull herself in two, but he’s only got one thing on his mind. “Are you an organ donor?” She says she is.

One of the three most important rules of the training is looking out for your own safety and well-being.

“Give me your hand,” Patrick says, and she does. It’s already going cold but her grip is so strong it surprises him. All it would take to end her suffering is a little tug, and he imagines it would be kind of like pulling apart gum or melted cheese – stringy and difficult to sever, but he’d be wrong.

Just one clean jerk and Patrick can end her hell. He can make it quick for her and she’d be quiet for him when he finishes the job the red Hummer started. If he got the upper half of the corpse to the hospital fast enough, they might be able to do something to help his sister. Lights start flashing behind him: the cavalry has arrived. He’d better make his decision fast. We need an answer.

What was the happiest day of Patrick’s life?

That’s easy. It was when he took his sister by the arm and helped her walk out of the hospital without some wheelchair or crutches or anything. She shed her tubes, wires, and monitors, but kept the scar between her breasts as a reminder. He joked with her that

62 it added a certain level of cool mystery to her otherwise dorky exterior. Now she had an edge, she might even be dangerous. People see something like that and wonder how someone gets a scar that big. Patrick suggested she create an elaborate story involving a knife fight origin, or a shark attack, or something.

Patrick loved to see her laugh again. Her color returned, her energy was back to normal, and she thanked him for always being by her side to help.

“You have no idea what it was like,” he told her. “To see you in that bed for so long. The things it did to me.” And he thought about all of the things he’d done and had to do to see her like that again, and he thought it was worth it.

She smiled and told him he must be used to that kind of thing, working in an ambulance and seeing it all. Even off the clock Patrick was saving lives, he saved hers.

She gave him a hug and walked to his car in the parking lot and he helped lower her into the seat. In the spot next to him was a red Hummer. Far away he could have sworn he could hear someone calling out for their mom and dad. Someone else somewhere else was screaming for help. It was all loud and clear but his sister didn’t seem to notice.

Patrick looked around. No one was there.

CHAPTER V

NOT GONE

I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but I dreamt last night that you died – killed yourself, actually. Suicide. I don’t know how you did it, but knowing you I’m sure it was quiet and quick, painless, yet undoubtedly overdramatic. When I heard the news from my long-since departed childhood dog, Oscar, who magically developed the ability to speak, I just kept crying to everyone that passed me by on the street: but why didn’t they come and talk to me? Which I’m sure is what every guilty party says when that sort of thing happens. I didn’t even know there was a problem. I could have helped. But we both know that would be a lie, and you’re probably laughing reading this because somehow, unsurprisingly, I’ve managed to make even your fictionalized death entirely about me.

I never made it to your funeral, so I never got to see if your little old grandma who played the harp was there, the one you loved so much and who I’d heard had lost her battle with dementia last year – I’m sorry by the way, but I’m sure, because it was a dream, she’d have been in the front row mourning the loudest and plucking an arrangement composed by and for the angels. Instead of attending, I got trapped on my way to buy flowers in what I intuitively knew, despite it looking nothing like it, was my

64 high school’s science hallway. It stretched on forever no matter how hard I pumped my arms when I ran or how much I screamed for someone to let me out, please god, just get me out of here so I can say goodbye.

Every classroom door that I opened led to something terrifying: glistening silk egg sacs bursting with billions of giant spiders and squids, chainsaw wielding clowns chuckling through knife teeth and chasing after me with their disproportionately long stilt legs. One door just had a ledge that dropped into an infinite, blackened abyss. I know nobody likes to hear about anyone else’s dreams unless they involve them, so I won’t go into what happened after, but I never did get out of there and none of the rooms led back to your service.

All day, when I’ve closed my eyes, my heart has raced a little because it feels like

I’m still stuck and like I haven’t gotten my chance to say what I wanted to say, but I’m not sure I know what that is either. The reason I’m writing this after all these years is just to remind you how much I’d miss you if you were gone. Not gone like the way you are now, but gone in a way where I know I could never pick up the phone and hear your voice before you figured out who it was and hung up. Or gone where I couldn’t send you a letter and see your bubble scrawl telling me to go to hell. Or gone where I couldn’t fly across the country to try and win you back like the lead in those movies we used to watch. It was only a dream, I keep telling myself. It was all only a dream.

CHAPTER VI

THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO THE MAGIC 8 BALL

Is that the last box?

Yeah, I think so. Did you get everything else out of dad’s room?

Yeah.

Then that’s the last box. Set it down here.

Look out.

Be careful.

It’s heavy.

I think it’s from the attic. What’s inside? Anything that can break?

Looks like…more of our old toys.

Oh my god, look.

I haven’t seen that in –

Do you remember when we used to play with this thing and –

It was even better than when we would flip to random passages in the Bible.

Ask it something.

Q: Will I get laid tonight?

A: Ask again later.

It figures. Just as reliable as always.

No, come on. That’s not how we used to play with it. Ask it something real.

Q: Why does summer zoom by and winter drag on forever?

A: Outlook not so good.

What does that even mean? My outlook isn’t good?

Q: What is the best way to lose weight?

A: You may rely on it.

You’re not doing it right. Give it to me.

Wait, I have another.

No, it’s my turn. You already did three.

Come on. One more.

Q: What factors should I consider when selecting a life insurance company?

A: Cannot predict now.

Thanks for nothing. Here. You try.

You’re not asking the right questions.

Q: What is the secret to happiness?

A: It is certain.

See? That’s deep.

Let me try again.

Q: Do animals really have a sixth sense?

A: Without a doubt.

That one worked.

Oh, give it back. I’ve got a good one.

Q: How long will I live?

A: As I see it, yes.

I guess that one could sort of work if you –

You’re reaching.

Q: What is the meaning of life?

A: Outlook good.

Again with the outlook thing. Let’s finish packing and go. We have to get dad checked in at the home in –

Wait. Let’s just do a few more.

I’ve still got to get back and make dinner. Tyler will be back with the kids in a few hours and dad’s still –

This is the last time we’ll be in this house, doing this, ever again.

Fine.

Q: How do you know when to end a friendship?

A: Signs point to yes.

This is stupid.

Come on. You ask another one.

Q: When is your future behind you?

A: Better not tell you now.

Great, thanks for nothing.

Q: By what age should you know what you want to do with your life?

A: Concentrate and ask again.

I don’t want to play anymore.

Q: Is money the root of all evil?

A: Very doubtful.

Do you remember that one time when we asked it –?

Oh yeah, and it –?

Let’s ask that one again.

Q: Will God really forgive all of my sins?

A: My sources say no.

It did it again.

That’s so eerie.

Q: Why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?

A: It is decidedly so.

Those two sort of go hand in hand.

Q: Is everything relative?

A: Reply hazy try again.

What a cop-out. Why doesn’t this thing like me? You get all of the good ones.

Q: Why is it so hard to say you’re wrong?

A: My reply is no.

So arrogant.

This toy is kind of a jerk.

Q: Why do married folks begin to look like one another?

A: Most likely.

What’re you laughing about? Is that supposed to be about Tyler and me?

Ask again later.

You’re kind of a jerk, too.

Q: Can love really last a lifetime?

A: Don’t count on it.

Put it away. Let’s get out of here. This is getting depressing.

Q: Why do we turn into our parents when we swore we wouldn’t?

A: Yes.

CHAPTER VII

MICE IN THE ATTIC

The last mouse was clever and resilient. It wasn’t easily fooled like the others. It’d found a way to scoop off peanut butter and cheese without triggering the traps. Ian couldn’t figure out how it did this, because he couldn’t even set the damn things without having them clamp down on his fingers, and yet, here the mouse was again, tearing a series of pathways through the pink, cotton-candy insulation lining the floorboards of the attic. Why, Ian wondered, couldn’t it just take the weekend off?

Jack, his ten-year-old golden retriever who was starting to get hip problems, could hear the mouse’s scampering footsteps pitter-pattering across the ceiling. The dog followed with his sniffling black nose from one corner of the master bedroom to the next without bothering to get up. Even though it’d been months since she’d been gone, Ian instinctively reached an arm out to feel the other side of the mattress for his wife, Lena. It was cold. When, Ian wondered, was he going to get it through his head she wasn’t there?

After Lena first left, Ian tried to piece together what happened. He imagined she had scrambled to pack the bags, because she probably made the decision on an impulsive whim while she was on the phone with her retired mother across the country. The in-laws never did like Ian, always thought he drank too much. The kids probably cried and begged not to leave their daddy, saying they didn’t want to be pulled out of school to go

71 stay with grandma and grandpa, and Lena must have been so overwhelmed that when she looked at Jack she decided: you stay.

Now Jack was just like Ian – an unwanted leftover left behind. It bonded the two of them, Jack being the only thing waiting when Ian came home from the office. Now he had a soft spot in his heart for the dog no matter how many times he pissed on the carpet.

The sun was barely shining when Ian let Jack out into the fenced-in backyard to do his business. Ian’s morning breath hung in a putrid cloud over his face after he yawned and he swatted his hand to try and fan it away. There was still a foot of snow freeloading on the deck from a blizzard that had blown in a week before, but it had grown crunchy and hard, iced over and packed down from Ian’s boots when he’d come out to stare at the blanketed bare trees to wonder where life went wrong. He clutched his downy jacket, shivering, and called for Jack to hurry up. What was it about his home, Ian wondered, that drove away good things?

Jack trotted up the steps in an uneven gait and bounded through the screen door to shake off the cold that had clung to the underside of his fur. Flecks of wet splashed on the hardwood, and Ian grabbed a towel to wipe it up immediately. He never used to be a neat freak, but had irrationally decided out of strange superstition that everything in the house had to be exactly as it was the way Lena had left it in order for her to come back. It was important to him to make sure everything was normal when she returned.

Ian topped off the half-finished, melted whiskey on the rocks that’d been neglected overnight at his bedside. He sipped it while he pulled the steps down from the hallway ceiling. There’s nothing wrong with a drink every once in a while, Ian knew, regardless of what his mother-in-law thought.

Somehow he’d managed to keep it a secret at work about Lena and the kids. No one suspected a thing and he intended on keeping it that way. She’d come back eventually, and he still loved her regardless of how selfish she’d been. Ian believed if you were going to leave a marriage it should be like leaving a place of employment – two weeks notice, at the minimum. It’s polite. Proper. But Lena? No. Nothing. Not a note, phone call, or explosive argument to end the best of what he’d worked so hard to achieve.

She said later she needed time, space, not to contact her or the kids anymore. How, Ian wondered, could she do this to him?

He took a sip of his drink and it helped. He tried to explain that to her.

Snapping the dangling light bulb to life from the wooden beams overhead, Ian found the trap empty. No body to be recovered. The scaffolding of the home was exposed in the attic, the foundational skeletal structure that supported everything. Ian figured the mice must have sensed the love, the warmth, the security, which radiated from within the house to the outside. They sniffed his place out in particular, over anyone else’s, because it had the vacant space. Indoors, the mice thought they’d be safe from the elements and that they could slide in where Ian’s family had left, but what the mice didn’t know was they would never be safe as long as he was there. He’d make sure of it.

The whole home invasion made Ian question what his children would think of their father if they returned home to hear vermin writhing about in the walls. They’d never make it a night alone in their rooms. They’d run in pleading to sleep between Lena and him like they did when they were younger. He’d be jolted out of a dream from the sting of a tiny torpedo foot or an unconscious backhand to the face. He didn’t ever want to go back to those restless nights. Knowing the kids, he imagined they’d probably say:

“daddy, the walls are alive; the house is trying to eat us.” And he’d say: “shhhh, it’s going to be okay, it’s just a little mouse, daddy will kill it soon.”

Ian picked up the trap and tried not to trip over the minefield of cardboard boxes blocking the way down, each with Lena’s loopy handwriting scrawled across the side.

The dust-covered cubes were stuffed with all of the things from their lives they didn’t have room for elsewhere. With wrinkled corners and musty sighs they served as hiding spots for the mice, and when he first found the infestation up there, he had to move all of the boxes around to look for droppings. He made the mistake of peeking inside a few.

In one box, marked with the kids’ names: Travis + Dina, he found memory books

Lena made. Report cards, yearbook pictures, ribbons for winning jump rope contests and spelling bees at school were glued into the stickered binders charting each of their childrens’ short lives so far. Ian hadn’t seen the scrapbooks since long before his family left, and he found himself flipping to the empty, blank pages at the back waiting to be filled, hoping he’d magically find a an update of where they’d been and what they’d done.

He wanted to find out if Travis kept on practicing his pitch and improving his throwing arm since he’d shown so much potential. If Ian hadn’t been so busy with work, he’d have loved to spend some more time helping him by playing catch in the backyard.

Ian would do anything to get those lost moments back now. Or, did Travis decide he liked photography more? Lena would love that. Ian was curious if Dina got her braces off. He figured she’d had them on for a long time, and it felt like they’d paid the orthodontist enough to put the doctor’s next four generations through college. Did the kids ever ask about their old man or wonder what he looked like now, like he did them?

And what did Lena tell them? Did they know why she left? Would she really tell them the truth? Did Lena ever miss him? Did any of them?

Ian left the attic with the empty trap in search of something new to use as bait. He took a sip of his drink to forget he ever opened that box labeled Travis + Dina. It helped.

Lena was the one that liked peppermint patties. Ian never liked anything with the mint and chocolate combination; he teased her that it tasted like a toothpaste dessert. The bag that’d been sitting in the pantry that Lena didn’t take was well past the expiration date. She wouldn’t mind if he used one. It was going toward a good cause and if she wanted more she could always buy new ones or just come back and finish those, Ian figured. Besides, he didn’t have much else in the cabinets.

Unwrapping the shiny plastic foil, he took out the candy and broke it in half.

Twisting the white filling into the copper lever on the balsa wood, he smiled and thought of the pain it’d bring to the mouse. It took him three attempts to reset the trap without it claiming a digit in the attic. Ian knew all too well those rattraps would get you if you weren’t careful; the distribution had to be perfect. They were good for catching and killing, or at least they were supposed to be.

Before the mice problem, Ian stayed out of the attic. It was brutally freezing in the winter and scorching hot in the summer without much leeway in the off seasons. A fan had been broken since they moved in and he never bothered to replace it, he assumed this was how the mice got in, so the air hung thick and heavy like a smoke bomb. The last time he’d went up there was a few months before Lena left. He’d moved the box marked

Wedding to the deepest, darkest, most cobwebbed back corner, far enough away where he couldn’t get to it again without some effort. Now it seemed like he hid it in another state

75 because after he’d had a few drinks in him, his legs weren’t of much use. He’d never be able to reach it even if he wanted to. And he didn’t. Before leaving the peppermint patty trap, he took a sip and sized the shadowed box up before shutting off the light.

It was time to wait.

Dina’s room still smelled like Play-Doh and Travis’s still had a vague smell of prepubescent perspiration. It was different from other kinds of sweat stench, Ian decided

– like mischief mixed with the wind. Ian often came into each of their rooms to go through their drawers and sniff the clothing they didn’t take. It still had their scent, too.

He’d lie on their floors and press their shirts and sheets to his nose and inhale as if it were his first breaths after nearly drowning. Then he’d cry and cry. He was always careful not to disturb anything, to put it right back where he found it, and shut their doors tight to preserve the house like a museum.

Ian called for Jack to come keep him company when he got downstairs to the living room where he was starting in on a microwavable TV tray meal and a bag of chips, the only things he felt capable of preparing. He put on the news to remind himself that there were lots of people out there who had it worse. He liked to keep up to date on the things that he needed to protect his family from when they came home. One day, he’d hold them close and tell the kids: “I won’t let anything get in here, don’t you worry.

There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The basement was the playroom. All of the toys they didn’t take with them were still strewn about in every direction. He wanted to go down there to think after he ate.

He knew it couldn’t have been another man who won Lena’s heart and stole her away because she never left the house for anything other than groceries and round-trips to

76 the school. And if she was unhappy, why didn’t she just tell him? He could’ve fixed things. He was a reasonable guy. When he had his sights set on something, he got it.

That’s how he got her. How he climbed the ranks at work. That’s how he was going to kill the last of the mice: hard work, dedication, and persistence. She used to tell him that his confidence was sexy.

Ian thought he knew the kids better than she did because she left behind Travis’s favorite toy: a chiseled plastic Superman, no bigger than six inches. The packaging said he’d had over thirty points of articulation. Christmas morning, when Travis opened him, his face lit up because somehow Santa knew the exact thing he’d wanted every time they went to the store. Everything in that moment was perfect for the family. They played and posed the toy in the wackiest stances they could dream up. Travis laughed so hard that he begged for Ian to stop, and Ian tickled Dina, and she did frantic kicks and grabs for his arms while she howled like a hyena. She’d gasped so much he had to give her a second to catch her breath for fear she might never get it back. Lena watched and smiled so big.

They were happy.

Downstairs steps were a bit of a challenge for Ian after he was this many in. He almost lost his footing and skipped over one, and if not for the railing, he’d fall and undoubtedly break his neck. Was that what Lena wanted? Did she want to leave him helpless, no one to even find him except Jack, who was already waiting and sniffing around the carpet at the bottom of the landing?

Travis’s Superman was grounded, left lying on its side with an outstretched arm that should’ve been punched toward the sky. One of the knees was bent, and the cape dangled along its spine. There was a reassuring grin etched into the jawline, a fallen and

77 forgotten hero that reminded Ian of better times. He’d walked past, or nearly stepped on the toy a hundred different times since it had been left out from Travis’s last play date with a friend from across the street, but something was different now.

The toy wasn’t right; it wasn’t how it was left. Smeared between its eyes and plopped around the left cheekbone were five tiny black dots. Ian’s heart sunk at the idea of ants invading the home, a further attack from nature, but as he bent down to get a closer look he saw it for what it was: mouse shit.

Was nothing sacred?

As he vacuumed the entire basement and hand washed every toy, Ian pledged to go to the liquor store to get something expensive, top shelf, for the celebration of the mouse’s death. It’d be a perfect time for his family to come back, to find him jolly and festive knowing the mouse was caught. Ian wished he could make the mouse’s end slower than what the quick release of the trap would offer. The mouse probably wouldn’t even know it was Ian that did him in – and now, after the defacing of Superman, Ian wanted the mouse to know it was him more than anything. Almost anything.

Ian considered investing in night vision goggles and a gun. He could hide in the attic and wait until the mouse came out, thinking the coast was clear to snatch the bait.

Then, Ian would unload a bullet, or five. He played the scenario in his head while laughing hysterically – they’d make eye contact a split second before he pulled the trigger, and the mouse would know, and Ian would know it would know, that it had been outsmarted. But even that would be too quick. What he should do, he thought, was wait and set a trap like he’d seen in cartoons where the box was propped up with a stick and

78 fastened with a string. He’d send it toppling down on the mouse when it least expected it.

Trapped.

And as he’d take the mouse out, it would probably try to bite him, so he’d wear gloves. Its little thumbtack feet would press on his fingers as he held it down on the cutting board. That’s where the real fun would begin, because those expensive knives that he’d got into that huge argument with Lena for buying from the door-to-door salesman who promised they’d cut through brick would get their only use. But, Ian knew, if the mouse bit him it would probably go through the gloves, and it probably had rabies.

What would the kids say if their father was rabid? Or, if they returned to find him mid-slaughter, covered in the tiny organs and random bits of hair that spattered up as he pounded his fist into the mouse over and over again? Maybe poison was the way to go, but if he couldn’t find the mouse’s body because it died in his walls, the smell would haunt him. Ian knew the traps he set already were the only way. It got the other ones; it’d get this one too.

And just like that, a loud snap dragged Ian from the depths of oblivion into a hangover stupor faster than he ever thought possible. Age was not a gracious friend to the man who enjoyed a drink every now and then. He didn’t realize it, but he must have made it from the basement up to his bedroom because Jack’s head was in his lap and the dog had borrowed Lena’s spot in the king-sized bed. Ian was still holding onto a feather duster, and the ceiling fan’s rotating blades looked cleaner. Before checking the trap, Ian cracked open another bottle and filled his glass. Hair of the dog. It was a cause for celebration if he got it and even more of a reason to drink if he hadn’t.

His hands shook as he made his way up to the attic and the rumbling in the back of his throat stifled with another sip. It didn’t do any favors for him to climb with one hand, but the other had to hold his glass and plastic bag. He was careful, as always, not to spill.

The half of the peppermint patty was gone and in its place was a dead mouse and a mess of blood. I got you, Ian thought, you little bastard, I finally got you. He took a victory sip. The force of the trap flipped the whole thing over so that all Ian could really see at first glance was the index card sized, flimsy base with the mouse’s legs sticking out underneath like the Wicked Witch of the West.

It was just a little mouse after all, it didn’t look so clever or resilient, just brownish-grey along its back, white thin fur on the bloated belly, and little, pink, hairless paws. Stretched open wide like black holes were the pooled, lifeless eyes catching the tiny speck of reflection from the bulb still swaying overhead. It must have thought it could grab the candy and steal away, but this time the weight dispersion on the orange square sent the metal U crashing down where the head ended and the neck began. The same spot where all the others had been hit, all of the mouse’s brothers or sisters or father or mother or kids, all killed the same way.

Ian was beginning to wonder when the mouse would just give up and jump on the trap to get it over with, if it would do it just to join its kin and end its loneliness. They weren’t ever coming back; Ian wanted to scream through the walls when it’d start rustling in the middle of the night. They weren’t ever coming back. But none of it mattered now because it was dead. Ian took another sip. He suspected all along that the insulation ripping was a way for the mouse to communicate it hadn’t forgiven him, could never

80 forgive him for what he’d done. Ian was the enemy and the mouse was doing everything it could to stick it to him, for revenge for his fallen brethren. But Ian won.

With the plastic bag, he picked it up like it was a pile of Jack’s crap and his legs buckled. He dropped it the first time. Even in death the mouse was an annoyance, making him look foolish.

So much blood spilled that it seeped into the corner of one of the cardboard boxes nearby, so Ian opened the flaps to see if there was any damage to the items inside. He did it before reading the description on the side, and when he looked in, he immediately wished he hadn’t. It was all the old family videos: road trips, holidays, birthdays – all of the times where they’d smiled and laughed and drank. All of the times they were happy.

He tossed the mouse’s plastic blue coffin down the steps like a paratrooper toy and watched as Jack ran up to claim it as his own. Hoisting the box to his shoulder, Ian steadied himself in his descent. Already he could hear Jack shredding through and getting to the corpse.

Ian made a second trip up and down to retrieve his glass, but he didn’t forget it up there. He couldn’t. He sank it back and topped it off before trying to decide which memory he wanted to slip into. This was the closest he’d get to a time machine, and he felt he had to choose wisely about what he’d want to relive. The Christmas that Travis got Superman sprung to his mind faster than a speeding bullet. Digging around to see the other tapes, Ian second-guessed his choice for Dina’s fifth birthday – the year he gave her the pink journal with Barbie on the cover. She immediately started scribbling her fairy tales inside and she’d read them out loud to her brother, acting them out along the way, spinning in place, hopping on one foot because she was so excited to get out her story she

81 couldn’t wait. Ian knew one day it would be preserved in a museum when she became a famous writer.

Jack was crunching and coughing something up on the linoleum tiles of the kitchen and it was too loud of a distraction, so Ian screamed for the dog to come or stop, but it didn’t do a thing. He wandered over to find the dog tossing the mouse’s several puddled pieces back and forth in front of the fridge, playing. Jack’s long tongue lapped up the intestines and something else, something unexpected. Bunched up in tiny, wrinkled, flesh-colored balls and leaking from what was once the mouse’s stomach were what Ian assumed to be babies.

He shook his head and sipped his drink and dragged Jack by the collar off the mess. Ian was thorough to clean up the gore, erasing what looked like a crime scene, even moving the fridge to get behind it. Who knew, he wondered, that there was so much in something so insignificant?

The TV had already started playing the video despite a lack of audience, and by the time Ian managed to throw back the recliner with the dog at his feet, Travis had already opened up Superman. Ian was holding Travis in the air, his hands fully extended in front of him, and in his son’s was Superman. They were both flying around the room with Dina in pursuit, roaring with a dinosaur toy and a pink tutu. Her laugh was infectious and devastating.

The thing that first struck Ian was how young he looked in the video. Lines on his face hadn’t arrived; there was even a little glimmer in his eyes. He thought they’d always had a dull glaze. God, he was so much thinner back then and his hairline had really pulled back these last few years. Like any good father, he had on a smile and kept a drink at

82 hand. Lena was filming and he could hear her voice telling Dina to be careful by the

Christmas tree glowing in the background.

Needing a break, a moment to breathe, Ian stumbled to the bathroom. Jack watched with concern from outside the door, and the horror in the trashcan of the kitchen was beginning to smell like rotted meat. Ian could feel vomit gurgle up, but he’d become a master of swallowing it down, of ignoring the problem. By the time he came back to his chair, the recording was over and it jumped to something else he’d filmed. It took him a few seconds to even recognize his own slurred voice through the disoriented mumble on the screen. The camerawork was shaky and blurred; the lens whirred in and out of focus.

There was a loud clunk before he set the camera down on the dresser across from his bed.

Lena was scowling, turned away from him with her arms folded. She was wearing her purple silky nightgown meant for special occasions, so Ian knew this must have been an anniversary, or birthday, and he watched as he fell into frame with a near empty glass in tow. All he was wearing were boxers and an undershirt and his voice quaked as he frequently paused to giggle or nuzzle against Lena’s neck when he did finally manage to get under the sheets. She pulled away every time he touched her, but it didn’t stop him.

He kept going, insisting.

“No,” she said. “Stop.”

“Come on. Let’s just see what happens with the camera on…?”

“You had better not be taping over anything.”

“No.” Ian belched. “Of course not.” His hands fumbled with the straps at her shoulder and he wiped his nose down her arm. He was so much thinner then, and drunker than he ever thought he appeared. He really had let himself go. He really had let himself

83 down. If Lena ever found out that he taped over Christmas for a failed attempt at a homemade porno because he was drunk, she’d never forgive him. She’d never come back.

He stopped the video before anything more could happen and spent a few minutes staring at his swaying reflection in the dining room mirror. The world swirled behind him. Jack looked up from his flattened position on the floor and Ian noticed each thinning strand of hair at the top of his own forehead. Soft flesh peeked out from beneath his shirt, his gut hung over his waistband. He had more hair lining the perimeter of his belly button than he did at the top of his head. And the pants that he wore now were double the size of what he used to wear. What happened? His children would walk through the door any day now and not even be able to recognize the inflated man that claimed to be their father.

Armed with the whole bottle of whiskey, Ian returned to the basement and went into the small tool room past the kids’ toys, slugging back deep gulps. He kept drills and hammers and screwdrivers fixed to the wall with hooks, and on the ground were his meager accumulations of weights and exercise equipment that were beginning to look like they hadn’t been touched in a hundred years. It was probably closer to a decade, but it was time to change all that.

It may’ve been a simple, cluttered set up, but it was everything he needed for a fresh start. Things were going to be different, he told himself with a sip. It had been so long since he’d done anything physical that he couldn’t even remember how much he could bench. Back when he’d played football in college, he could probably lift two hundred pounds, he thought, but maybe not, because that seemed like an awful lot now.

But if he wanted to be the man that his children, that his wife, remembered – the good father that was always there – he had to be strong. To be safe, he decided to start conservatively, and only loaded one hundred and ninety pounds on. He took a sip, and it helped him be brave, so he slid onto the bench and lined the bar up with his eyes and wrapped his fingers around the crosshatched grip. His breath was steady and deep; almost like sleep, and he could smell the iron. If he wanted to be a good father, he told himself, he had to give it everything he had.

He felt his muscles tear and separate as he struggled to pull it off the stand and his elbows jettisoned to his side allowing the metal to clank to a halt between two of his ribs.

They turned to powder as he let out a yelping gasp. Jack wagged his tail, barking and whining at his feet.

Ian’s face was red and puffy, his eyes crumbled into bloodshot fractures, and he tried to make peace with the fact that he was going to die. The bar sunk deeper. If Lena and the kids came back right this moment, he couldn’t even scream to alert them as to what was happening. They’d never hear him, they’d just find his body and wonder why, when, what, how?

Twisting and writhing, the plates that he’d neglected to fasten with a clip to the end of the bar came crashing down, shattering the bottle of whiskey on the floor, and sending Jack scattering. Ian crawled out from underneath, sore, wheezing, and sobered up. The smashing of the weights still echoed through the room, and the blood rushed through his ears to make it sound like the front door was opening with three sets of footsteps floating overhead. He’d come so close to death and yet he couldn’t even do that right.

CHAPTER VIII

UGLY HOMES

Another chilly late spring evening where summer was racing and trees struggled to keep pace, their skeletal branches bare and frozen with stunted blossoms. Rough elephant hide bark hid crooning birds busy building where twig tips tickled sky. Lawns lived in light and died with dew of dark, a continuous cycle of resurrection.

Our apartment balcony overlooked the greasy pizza place and Dunkin’ Donuts and small duplexes edging narrow cracked roads. Mumbled hums of car alarms, playful children, and drunks going to get their fill washed the street.

Her barefoot heels dangled over the cobwebbed railing like she was dipping her toes into the atmosphere ten stories high. She sat on my lap. I held her close. Held her up.

She said in her lazy way look at all of those houses – straight edges, blocky, cookie- cutter.

Geometric, I think, I said. All painted with the same white, brown, grey a long time before and now peeled and flaked and faded away with each new storm and shift of season.

They’re just man-made constructions trying to be right, she said. Calculated, approximated architecture precisely two windows to every side parallel to screen doors

86 and welcome mats like they came from a catalogue. But look at the trees – uneven, bumpy-smooth, many armed and stretching toward twilight.

Our eyes traced the curves of an oak as if we were following a roller coaster. We leapt together from sycamore to willow to fir as if we were acrobats waiting to catch the other. Imperfection is natural beauty, one of us said. Her crown rested heavy on my shoulder but I wouldn’t let go.

Every time I see a naked tree, I try to picture the roots underground beneath the surface, I said.

She shrugged, it’s probably exactly the same as it is up top but covered in soil and dirt and worms instead of wind and moss and bees. I thought about the world that must exist six-feet deep, it had to be there.

If you strip everything away, doesn’t that make a hidden symmetry? I asked. But she just laughed and went inside.

I didn’t realize then how much I needed and while the sun slept swaddled in a blanket of constellations I remember I had never felt so alone.

CHAPTER IX

THE LACY LAVENDER THONG

Janice’s open car door pinged in a monotone metronome as she took three trips back and forth to bring in all of the groceries. The whole time she could hear the neighborhood kids squealing and screeching as they ran up and down the street in a pack.

A boy in a blue windbreaker was the straggler of the group; he took his time to ride his tricycle by her driveway and didn’t break eye contact even when she waved politely. It was unnerving. The Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head said something was wrong.

When Janice got to the top of her stairs, her bedroom door was cracked open and she had the strangest prickling along the back of her neck like someone was waiting for her. But she was alone. All she needed, she’d decided, was a shower to wash away the mental stickiness she felt whenever she was forced to leave her home. But Janice stopped in her tracks when she noticed peeking out from underneath her bed was another woman’s underwear.

A lavender thong. She couldn’t believe it.

The lacy thong was crumpled and curled by the plush duvet cover, folded in on itself like a bud before bloom. Using her thumb and index fingers like pincers, Janice

88 plucked it to examine the flimsy strap at the back. Maybe, she thought, it was supposed to be a gift to her from Howard. But for what? Their sixteenth wedding anniversary was months ago, her birthday even longer back, and Valentine’s Day and Christmas were still far off. It must have been one of those “Just Because” presents that Howard used to give her when they were first dating. How romantic.

As Janice adjusted the showerhead and tested the water temperature before stepping in, her laugh launched off the glass sliding door and the standalone marble

Jacuzzi tub nearby. Howard always was horrible at hiding gifts, keeping secrets. She could see right through him. Every year she’d discover her Christmas presents early because he’d try to hide them in the walk-in closet they shared, or he’d leave a receipt in the pocket of his slacks that she’d unearth during laundry. Admittedly, the thong was an unexpected and uncharacteristic purchase. It was so unlike Howard to be so forward and risqué. It was so unlike Janice to wear such a thing.

When she got out of the shower and got dressed in a baggy t-shirt and sweatpants, topped off with a robe, Janice stripped the sheets off the California king bed and threw them into the hamper. She figured while she was at it that she could wash the thong too, that way when Howard gave it to her – whenever he planned on giving it to her – she could try it on immediately and not have to worry about any germs or chemicals that it may have come into contact with at the store. Janice hated feeling dirty.

Outside, the neighborhood kids were laughing; their high-pitched obscured screaming echoed off the empty houses like a long distance game of telephone with the next city over. Just where were their parents? Why weren’t they at school? It must have been one of those made up holidays or parent-teacher conference days that got them out

89 of class. Janice looked out the laundry room window as she dumped over the basket of dirty clothes to see the kids playing, running over her well-groomed lawn, trampling on her perennials in her flowerbeds even though she’d yelled at them, she’d told them multiple times, not to cut through her backyard. She should’ve put up a fence. The boy in the blue windbreaker, the straggler, paused to watch her for a moment as he ran by the window.

The kitchen was a grocery minefield. All of the plastic bags from the supermarket had their handles frozen into peaks from the tension of holding their contents, pointed up toward the lazily swiping ceiling fan like the tips of flames. Janice heard the washing machine go into a spin cycle and she removed the jars of pickles and boxes of pasta onto the marbled countertops and into the walk-in pantry where they were neatly organized.

Everything in the house had a place, an order that Janice deemed herself to be the keeper of.

Sometimes, it got lonely being in their quiet, three-bedroom, three-floor home. It could get so quiet that Janice would start to overthink things. There was that dangerous, nagging Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head that wound her up. The Little Voice

At the Back of Janice’s Head would give her suggestions for topics to ponder that she didn’t like remembering or exploring. Usually, if she kept herself occupied or turned on the television set, she could drown it out and distract it away. But today, the Little Voice

At the Back of Janice’s Head was saying maybe, just maybe, that thong wasn’t meant for her. Maybe she found something she wasn’t supposed to see. Maybe that thong belonged to someone else.

But who could it be? And in typical Janice fashion her insecurities were like gasoline soaked dynamite and her doubts were the lit match needed to blow the whole world apart. Because Janice knew the answer to her question before the Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head ever asked it. It had to be Howard’s bimbo secretary’s underwear, and Janice wasn’t the least bit surprised that she was able to summon that connection with such ease. She always had a bad feeling about her. Who else’s could it be? What was her name again? Roxy? Trixie?

For a second, it sounded like one of the boys or girls outside had gotten hurt, but after whining they settled down. Janice couldn’t have kids. Howard said he didn’t mind, that it didn’t bother him. But what if it did? He’d have said something, right? This secretary could probably have children. Maybe Howard not wanting children was just a lie after all these years, or a change of heart he never voiced and only came to terms with now during a rambunctious midlife crisis. If Janice were able, would that have changed anything?

What kind of a woman was this secretary who just left a fling with someone else’s husband without noticing she didn’t have on her underwear? What kind of a woman wore a thong?

The Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head made Janice think about the way that lacy lavender thong must have looked when Howard’s curvy secretary wore it, concealed like a secret between them while they reviewed executive accounts, or when she transferred incoming calls to his private line in a sultry voice: “Mr. Wing, I’ve got your ugly, old, fat cow wife Janice on line two.”

How did it even start? Who made the first move? How did it come back to their home? Did Howard hire that secretary knowing he could have her any time he wanted?

Did he pull some sort of sleazy casting couch ploy during the job interview? Or, did that girl just start wearing lower and lower cut tops, tighter and tighter skirts that got shorter and shorter, until one day she bent down to pick up a dropped pencil and, “oops,” just like in a bad porno, her lacy lavender thong came out to wave hello. Howard probably couldn’t control himself then, he likely used his arm like a snowplow and shoveled everything off his desk, clearing it so he could throw the secretary over and take her from behind. What a pig.

Janice was willing to bet they continued the affair that night, breathless and pulsing with adrenaline from the knowledge they were doing something naughty, up to no good. Or, maybe it happened over many nights, and who knew for how long? At

Howard’s insistence to take up a hobby, Janice had signed up for pottery classes at the rec center. Now the Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head made Janice feel silly thinking back to all of those times where she left the house with her kiln apron and sculpting supplies, kissing Howard on the cheek and playfully telling him “don’t wait up for me.” She’d spent hours and hours with her hands coated in clay and her foot tapping a pedal like she was revving a car’s engine so she could make something nice for Howard.

But Howard couldn’t have cared less what Janice would make for him or when

Janice would come home, could he? Right after Janice closed the garage door, Howard’s secretary probably crouched out from the shadows of their spacious deck in the backyard and knocked on the glass sliding doors. Howard likely threw his newspaper across the

92 living room, clicked off the television set, folded up the leather recliner, and leapt to his feet to let her in. Maybe she only wore a long brown trench coat with nothing underneath.

They obviously went mouth to mouth the whole way up to the bedroom where

Janice had spent so long selecting and decorating curtains and carpet when they first moved in. Howard wrapped his secretary in those 800 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets and had his way with her the way he used to with Janice – the way he hadn’t in so long. How dare he. Maybe when Janice came back from class early last Tuesday to gift him with the lopsided ashtray she’d made, the secretary rushed out a window leaving her lacy lavender thong behind. Maybe she did it on purpose to mark her territory. She probably did.

And those kids outside with their laughter, their make believe, their imaginations at work, it was like nails on a chalkboard to Janice as she moved the first batch of clothes from the washer to the dryer and tried to keep herself calm enough not to go smash the lopsided ashtray she’d made for Howard.

Janice considered going upstairs, starting with the bedroom, and throwing every single thing that belonged solely to Howard out onto the front lawn. She’d let the neighborhood kids scavenge at whatever she tossed – they could use his silk ties for makeshift jump ropes, his custom tailored suits for kites, and his expensive Swiss watches as skipping stones. The final thing she’d whip out into the center of the driveway, and god willing it’d shatter into a million pieces and pop Howard’s tires when he came home, was the lopsided ashtray she’d slaved over.

Janice thought about finding the number for her old friend Carol Chandler, the woman who used to live down the street, since she knew all about divorcing a cheating

93 husband and taking him for all he was worth. Carol Chandler was the gossip of the whole town when she’d walked in to find her husband with several high-class escorts, writing off his infidelity as a business expense on the company dime and clock. Carol Chandler got so much in the settlement and alimony that she bought a beach house in Bermuda and now had a cabana boy bring her margaritas all day long. That didn’t sound so bad. The

Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head asked her which coast she’d like to watch the sunset on.

Pacing, thinking of nothing and thinking of everything, Janice remembered she had to vacuum. Routine was good; it kept the Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head at bay. She wanted to stay busy before she did something she might regret, so she rolled out the appliance. The black cord stretched along the hardwood floor to an outlet and right as she plugged it in she heard what sounded like a bird fly into her window. She knew that a baseball or rock just dented her aluminum siding and that a bunch of kids were scrambling as fast as they could away from the house before she could come out and see which one did it. It was probably the boy with the blue windbreaker and light-up

Velcro shoes. The straggler.

The Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head convinced her that she always had a bad feeling about that one. She never could figure out which house he came from or who his parents were. Once, when she was doing gardening, she caught him staring through her hedges at her while she was bent over in the dirt. It wasn’t until later on when she came inside that she realized her pants had been hanging halfway down for him to catch her on full display.

Him, and all of those kids outside with their naïve hope, their unlimited potential, their perfect little innocence that hadn’t been stripped away and debauched and betrayed yet by some cruel and callous man like Howard, how lucky they were. Janice wanted to warn them of what horrors lay ahead; she wished she could kick open the front door and join them as they rode their bikes, played tag, or had a sprawling game of hide and seek – maybe then it would all go away, she could be transported back in time where she could start everything over again and never speak to Howard at that charity banquet where they met some twenty odd years ago. Armed with this knowledge of a lacy lavender thong, she’d never fall for his charm.

Over the roar of the vacuum she tried to imagine how her life would be different if one of those little ones out there were her own. She always wanted one, always wanted two – a boy and a girl – Howard and her even talked about adopting, but Howard always said it was never the right time or he was too busy with work. And now what would happen if they did it? She didn’t want it anymore. She wanted it, but not like this.

Obviously they couldn’t now, there was no them, they couldn’t raise a child, why would she ever bring a child into this fractured relationship? What if his secretary got pregnant?

What would he do then? What would she do? The Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s

Head decided she’d probably kill herself if that happened. Maybe Howard, too.

Janice knew she had to go down to Howard’s office and confront the two of them.

Right now. She didn’t know what she’d do when she got there, but she’d figure it out along the way. And she knew Howard would tell her she was acting crazy, irrational, that she was just losing her mind and jumping to conclusions, giving in to her paranoia and constant suspicions she invented because she didn’t get out of the house enough, because

95 she needed more friends, maybe even a job. The sting of wasted years drew tears from her eyes and she grabbed a tissue to wipe them away as she temporarily silenced the vacuum. She wouldn’t give Howard the satisfaction of seeing her sob; she wouldn’t let that secretary watch her make-up run down her cheeks like raindrops on a windshield.

Drowned out by the noise of the vacuum again, Janice felt free to shout at the top of her lungs. Howard was a no good, two-faced, smooth talking, stone cold liar. He was a downright deceiving, selfish man-child who always worked late hours at the office and didn’t care about the sanctity of a sixteen-year marriage. He never learned how to keep his hands to himself, that was his problem. She should’ve known right away – years ago

– when he’d stopped perpetually clawing and grabbing and pinching at her, that something was wrong. How could she have been so stupid?

She pushed back the brown suede furniture, the leather recliner, and the hard oak table set so she could get underneath at the careless crumbs Howard dropped when he’d sloppily ate salt and vinegar potato chips or chocolate covered raisins. What could be attractive enough about Howard that some twenty-something would bother with him?

Just the other day when Howard got out of the shower, Janice watched him towel off and get dressed. He turned to grab black socks from the middle drawer of the dresser and she couldn’t believe what she’d seen.

“Oh my god,” Janice said, getting up to investigate, spinning him by his elbows to face away from her. “You’re growing back hair.”

Howard turned around and laughed, looking over his shoulder into the mirror.

“Oh no, that’s so gross.”

Janice felt like she had to reassure him, to be a good wife, to pretend like it wasn’t repulsive, like he wasn’t turning into some mossy monster.

“I guess I’ve crossed that point in my life now where I’m that old guy working out at the rec center with back hair. Do you think I should shave it off? Will you help shave my back for me?” He wrapped his arms around Janice’s waist and pulled her in close, his teeth yellowed, smelling still of stale breakfast coffee. She remembered the strong urge to pull herself free, to avoid touching the base of his neck where the hair was slowly creeping up to join the thinning strands on his head. “Will you still love me now that I’m some old man with back hair?”

And of course, she said of course, but she wasn’t so sure she could. That night when she had tried to go to sleep, the Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head kept her awake. She rolled to her side and eventually had to hold back her retching – disgusted to lie there knowing there were long, wet, wiry, coarse black hairs sprouting out of her husband’s torso like mangled stitches. And even worse – that he was doing nothing about it. Nothing could be done. Why would some girl who wore a lacy lavender thong, who still had her life in front of her, want to get involved with all of that?

More importantly, that’s when Janice knew it was all over for her, that there was no going back, that she was on the same exact track she’d always been on but never paid attention to. The final destination: getting old. She wondered if Howard felt the same way about her when he looked at her ridge of fat hanging over her waistband and spilling over her sides, the spiderwebbed varicose veins cracking the pale glass of her calves, the little mustache and chin whiskers she spent every morning plucking without him knowing, the hours spent dyeing her hair to make it look “natural.” What was the point? There was no

97 fighting the fact that with each passing second Janice grew more and more obsolete, soon to be replaced by the next hot, young, perkier thing in a lacy lavender thong.

The buzzer sounded and the clothes were ready to be taken from the dryer. Her hands pressed and folded and threw each garment into the basket as if she were working double time on an assembly line. The very last thing clinging to the back wall, so deep in there that she had to almost climb into the dryer to peel off was the lacy lavender thong.

She took it out and squeezed it in her palm like a stress ball. The lace floral pattern felt scratchy, how could anyone tolerate that? It must have been like a torture device – the lengths women will go to please men, the confinement of lingerie like a straightjacket.

Janice folded the thong as if it were so delicate she might break it in two when she placed it on top of the pile. But at the height of her stack of fresh clothes was a slew of her own underwear. She felt a surge of embarrassment to see the comparison of the thong to her own panties. Hers practically matched the white Y-front briefs Howard wore.

There was nothing feminine or flattering about them; they used triple the amount of the material as the thong and didn’t have even a fraction of the personality. And the Little

Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head asked, but what would that secretary possibly find appealing about wearing a thong? And the Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head asked, what would Howard think if Janice wore something like this?

Even though she was completely alone, Janice felt like she was being watched.

She looked over both of her shoulders as she slid off her robe and found her thumbs tugging at her pants to pull them down her thighs, shaking them free of each of her feet as they suctioned around her ankles. Removing her own underwear, she swapped it out, gingerly stepping one foot at a time into the thong and hiking it up until she couldn’t tug

98 them any higher. When she twirled in front of the downstairs bathroom mirror, she held up her baggy shirt so she could see the way it hugged her hips and nearly came up parallel to her belly button.

It violated any sense of understanding she had with prior underwear. The straps cut and accentuated her body to make her look full and supple, erasing the years. Though it had seemed so formless on the ground, bunched and inside out, it fit snug and didn’t slip or ride up at all. It was, Janice had to admit, both alluring and comfortable – the cotton portion softer, breathable, the lace intricate and pretty like stained glass. She didn’t think it would cover her but it did. The Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head, maybe for the first time ever, didn’t have a single negative thing to say.

Outside, the children were arguing over who was out and who was in and who’d been tagged and who’d moved when they didn’t say Simon Says. Janice didn’t put her pants back on; she tossed them into the basket full of clean clothes and ran them up the stairs, carefully putting them all away in their respective assigned spots. Any chance that she got to pass by a mirror or a TV screen or any reflective surface, she’d bend over or spin around in place to see the way her body looked so sleek and seductive in the lacy lavender thong. It made her feel exciting and new again, like even the most mundane of household chores was something fun. When she stretched new sheets over the mattress, she sprawled forward facedown on the bed and let the Little Voice At the Back of

Janice’s Head run wild with the possibilities.

Maybe all that she needed to do was get dressed and do her hair and put on more makeup and go to Howard’s work. She’d storm into his office and lock the door behind her. She’d rip off her pants to show him what she knew and what she could be and what

99 she still was. Maybe on the way in she could slap the secretary in her face when she undoubtedly tried to cover for Howard by saying he wasn’t in there, or he was busy, or he just stepped out for lunch, or he was in a meeting. She couldn’t have him. He was still

Janice’s husband.

And he’d always come back. That’s what Janice would do. She’d wait for him to come home, she’d greet him at the door with a nice, big dinner of his favorite – medium rare steaks she could grill on their deck, buttered mushrooms and onions for toppings, loaded baked potatoes with cheese and sour cream and scallions, and a cinnamon apple pie for dessert. They could feast and drink a few bottles of wine over a candlelight dinner, finally airing out their grievances, and then when they got through it – because they’d made it this far, they always got through everything, together – Janice could stand up and lead him upstairs. She could push him backwards onto the bed and tear away her bottoms to reveal the lacy lavender thong. He would have to earn her forgiveness. She liked the sound of that.

Janice ran downstairs to make sure she had all of the supplies that she’d need in the kitchen or freezer. Since she was feeling a little spring in her step, she decided to turn on the radio while she worked, and it wasn’t long before she was dancing with herself to some modern pop hit she’d normally scan right past in the car. She shook her hips as she moved around the kitchen and started slicing the apples into thin wedges; she marched in place with the hard beat of the music and the rapid-fire lyrics. In the surface of the oven window she could see her shirt just barely touched down to hide the thong, and when she shrugged her shoulders or moved her arms or reached to grab something just out of range

100 she saw it all. After doing it unintentionally a few times, she started to do it on purpose while she bobbed her head.

During a commercial break – an ad for some exciting blowout sale at a local car dealership – Janice spun in place to grab something from a cabinet and her eyes crossed over the sliding back door’s window. On her deck, with the blinds wide open, was the little boy, the straggler, in the blue windbreaker with the light up Velcro shoes. His eyes were wide, his face pressed against the glass with his hands hovering over his brow like binoculars as he peered in. He seemed oblivious that the glass went two ways, that she could see him watching her just as easily as he could see her cooking in her lacy lavender thong.

Janice froze for a moment, unsure of what to do, stuffing down that initial instinct to scream or cover her body or run away. She didn’t want to scare the boy and permanently scar him, in some weird way she almost found it flattering that he’d want to stare. Janice looked back at the apple pie crust and wondered how long he’d been watching, how much of her little scantily-clad dance routine he’d witnessed, or what he was hoping would happen. His hot breath fogged the window and dissipated.

She knew, at his age, that there wasn’t anything even remotely sexual about this act. It wasn’t some sort of prepubescent awakening for him. He was still years away from puberty. All of the appeal likely came from the vague notion of seeing something taboo and private, kids being kids, boys being boys. Maybe he heard her screaming and shouting over the roar of the vacuum and was concerned, being the good little Samaritan he probably was, and making sure she wasn’t in distress. How sweet.

101

And yet, the Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head said this whole silly thing was probably something the kid would remember for the rest of his life. It might even inform his sexuality in some way as he developed into a man. This moment could be the story he used as a trump card on the playgrounds when he wanted to show he was cool or experienced and worldly. Janice couldn’t remember the last time she’d meant so much to someone. And maybe one day, when he told a future lover about this, or when he’d brag to a buddy, they’d sit there in awe and shake their head in disbelief at such fortune – an older attractive neighbor woman and an impromptu peep show. So steamy it sounded made up.

The Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head had an idea. What was the harm in putting on a little performance, pretending she was oblivious? Why should Howard be the one to have all of the fun? She wasn’t doing anything wrong or lewd, she was in the privacy of her own home. After all, Janice reasoned as she shook her hips to another starting song, she was the type of woman to wear a lacy lavender thong.

During the silent seconds gap between tracks, just a few houses down, Janice could distinctly hear a girl bark out the orders: “you be the daddy and I’ll be the mommy and…” A smile spread over Janice and made her feel warm inside and before she knew it she felt her face get hot and wet. The Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head tried to convince her she wasn’t crying because she was happy and sad and everything else she always felt, but because she was dicing the onions for the steak. It had nothing to do with her helplessness, or that she felt like she was never in control of her thoughts. The real reason, she finally determined, which was only partly the truth, was she cried because she felt such a sense of longing for the straggler at the window, who was missing out on the

102 chance to play House with the rest of his friends. It was so cruel, Janice thought, that he was so unaware that these would be the things he’d miss, these times when everything made sense.

Janice just kept shimmying and shaking as she skidded barefoot across the kitchen tile, tenderizing the meat harder than necessary with her fists and using the bit of shirt at her shoulder to dry her eyes. But enough was enough. When the Little Voice At the Back of Janice’s Head started to chime in with something new about the secretary, or when the neighborhood children got so loud with their dramatic reenactments of approximate domesticity, she’d slither over to the radio and crank it up louder. It was just Janice and the straggler, frozen and leering like a statue, in this mess until Howard would come home and everything could go back to normal.

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CHAPTER X

RELATIONSHIP BAR TRIVIA

Why did Stacey have such low self-esteem?

A. Crippling depression stemming from her parents’ passive aggressive

manifestations of deep resentment for birthing her in their teenage years, ruining

the prime of their lives.

B. The fact that you were done with her a year into your two-year relationship, yet

led her on so you could stay comfortable.

C. Her unconventional beauty and plain physique.

D. Years of bullying by the popular girls in high school for her frizzy hair, lazy eye,

and braces.

Hint:

Beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder.

This goes beyond high school.

The universe doesn’t revolve around you.

They liked her sister more because she was planned.

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Even though she dumped you first, what was the reason you would have

eventually left Sharon?

A. She smoked cigarettes behind your back when you asked her to quit.

B. She bit her nails.

C. You were young, emotionally unstable, and uncertain of what was expected of

you in order to be a good partner.

D. That one time in your basement when your mom walked in on you two having sex

was also the same day where Sharon found her gauges in her purse and she

swapped them out in front of you so that you could see the dangly flapping

earlobe, and the new gauges that she put in had bits of crushed tobacco from the

pack of cigarettes she had crammed in the bottom of her bag that she was trying to

hide from you, and you remember that she just brushed off those gauges and slid

them in her floppy ear holes without even washing them off or anything.

Hint:

Youth can only be blamed for so much.

As long as you’re happy, mom doesn’t care.

Quitting cold turkey is unrealistic.

It ruins the nail polish.

Why was Rebecca the love of your life, your one true soul mate that you’ll never

be able to get over no matter how hard you try?

A. She was someone you could tell anything to, she never judged you; in fact, you

two rarely ever fought over anything, which was ultimately a problem since you

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both allowed yourselves to grow distanced and detached, dissolving your

relationship.

B. You’d known her since the seventh grade and she always cared about you, she

even reached out to the school guidance counselor when you were in that all

black, suicidal, angsty phase because she was worried about you. At the same

time, maybe she didn’t have enough of an identity outside of you.

C. She was beautiful and you never felt such a connection with another human being.

Time spent with her always made you feel like you were getting away with

something naughty – a total escape from the harsh realities of life. It was

refreshing, but also probably unhealthy for you to hold her on such a pedestal.

D. It was only a few months ago when she dumped you over the telephone and you

two had a long discussion a week later about everything and you felt good about it

and only sent her an email thanking her for her time like it was all just some big

job interview, but you’re sort of proud because you haven’t even sent a drunk text

or anything all this time later, and you know she only dumped you because she

made that trip out to Washington for that work conference, and you have your

suspicions she fucked some guy in a bar and didn’t tell you, but she obviously felt

guilty after she realized how truly unhappy she was, like that one time when you

were out to dinner with her parents and she got drunk off two beers and said in

front everyone that you shouldn’t criticize the way she spent her time and how her

kitchen counter was stacked with dirty dishes because she was busy with a job

that would actually bring home money, and you two went back to the apartment

that night and she didn’t even apologize, you had to keep asking her to, and she

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started crying and said things weren’t working, and you somehow convinced her

it was just the alcohol, but you were still so blind because you didn’t want to face

the truth, and neither did she. It’s only been a little bit of time so you should give

yourself a chance to heal.

Hint:

Suicide isn’t painless.

No need to come down from there.

You can’t talk to the past.

Time heals all wounds, some idiot said.

How do you know things aren’t going to work out with Jackie?

A. She’s far too clingy and demands you text her every hour on the hour, believing

your relationship to be dead and lacking passion if you ever forget to respond – a

nasty habit she picked up from a slew of psychotic ex-boyfriends.

B. She doesn’t have any common sense and her sketchy past is proof that she’s made

some poor decisions due to her naivety and inexperience with the world, but then

again she’s only twenty and you weren’t any better then.

C. She’s extremely materialistic and shallow when it comes to her interests, her

choice of television programs, and fashion sense.

D. She’s different from you in every way, and it complements you perfectly and

brings about aspects of your personality that you never knew existed, which

challenges you.

Hint:

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Money can’t buy me love.

Some things you can’t teach in a classroom.

You’re just as clingy.

Nobody likes a challenge.

Why are you terrified to be alone?

A. Rebecca.

B. Stacey.

C. Sharon.

D. None of the above.

Hint:

You can’t blame others.

Take responsibility for your actions.

There’s nothing wrong with being single.

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CHAPTER XI

THE COUCH AND PAULY SHORE

Bethany and Kevin discovered their new couch didn’t fit through the doorframe of their first shared apartment.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea.” Bethany struggled to lift her end any higher.

Kevin wiped sweat from above his lips. “Just try for me, Bethany.” But she couldn’t. They’d been at it for hours.

They left the couch in the hallway. Kevin assured her no one would steal it while they were gone. Their new neighbors were so old it was practically a retirement home. It was a nice, safe community they felt they should join now that they were out of college, engaged, and approaching their thirties. It was time to settle and slow down. Plus, with the elevators out of service, someone would have to want the sofa enough to lug it down four flights of stairs, or try to fit it through their own narrow door.

With the stress of moving came the constant argument of who-knew-how-to-move-better:

Don’t pack the boxes that way, Bethany told Kevin, you’re going to break that.

I told you that we should’ve pulled the truck up to the other end of the building,

Kevin said to her, now we’ve got to go even further.

Turn it this way, she whined.

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No, pivot it this way, he yelled.

And so, Kevin and Bethany drove to the Brew Bar – because they always went out to eat at the Brew Bar – in a cranky silence they hoped food would remedy. Brew Bar was the same dive joint they’d been coming to since freshmen year, the place that didn’t

I.D. with the cheapest beer and food.

“Oh my god,” Kevin said after they sat down and got their drinks. “Is that Pauly

Shore?”

Bethany followed his flickering side-eyed glance across the dimly lit red booths.

A few five o’clock shadowed, blue-collar drunks cheered as the beehive cluster of TVs showed the slow-mo replay of a fifth inning home run. Elderly white-hairs sawed through rough rubbered t-bones beneath local sports memorabilia. There were never any students leftover during the summers; they all went someplace better. Bethany wanted to go, too.

As a young girl, she pictured summers at this age would be spent volunteering for the

Red Cross or joining the Peace Corps, sweating in a hot country’s sun where the natives lived in mud and didn’t speak a lick of her language. Instead, they were spent at the Brew

Bar. With Kevin.

“Who’s Pauly Shore?” Bethany asked.

“The movie star from the 90s, you know…” Kevin attempted a bad impression.

“It’s the Weasel, buuuuuuuuudddy. Ow-ow!”

“What?”

“That was a thing he’d do. Remember? He was in Bio-Dome. And In the Army

Now. Um, Son-in-Law. Encino Man.”

“That guy wasn’t the Encino Man.” Bethany looked over her shoulder.

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“Don’t make it so obvious. He wasn’t the Encino Man. That was Brendan Fraser.

Pauly Shore was Sean Astin’s wacky friend who helped him find the caveman in the backyard. He had long curly hair and dressed like a clown, really bright colors. Is this ringing any bells?”

“Right. Okay.” Bethany squinted and shook her head. “And who is Sean Astin?”

Kevin sighed. If anyone else recognized Pauly Shore they didn’t show it. He sat smiling, wrapped up in conversation, sipping dark liquor. “Pauly Shore was the voice of

Max’s friend in The Goofy Movie. The Leaning Tower of Cheese-uh Guy.” Kevin could always pinpoint what role Bethany would know an actor from since she had such a limited exposure to movies. She liked that about him, it reminded her he knew her well.

“Oh yeah. Now I remember him. But I don’t know what he looked like in real life. Are you sure that’s him?”

“Pretty sure.” Kevin ran his fingers through his thin hair. He’d let it get shaggy – partly to make it look fuller, mainly out of laziness. “Oh my god. I can’t believe this is happening. What’s he doing out here? They don’t do shows at the college in the summer.

Nobody’s here.”

“Maybe he has family in the area? Friends?” Bethany flattened her straw wrapper and folded it in on itself like a compressed accordion waiting to screech.

“He doesn’t.”

“How do you even know?”

“A guy like him should be in Hollywood, not out here.” Kevin looked into his lap.

“Go over and talk to him. Ask for a picture. I’ll take it for you.”

“I can’t. Nobody else is bothering him.”

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“You’re a fan.”

“The role of an entertainer ends when I leave the theater. I wouldn’t want anyone to interrupt my night out with friends.”

“You paid to see his movies. He can’t do what he did without people like you.”

Kevin nodded. “I even own all of his films on Blu-Ray.” Kevin’s massive collection spanned more boxes than Bethany’s clothes. They still had to move them off the back of the truck. “But I can’t demand he stop what he’s doing to get up and pose like some kind of cardboard cut out.”

“So just go say hi. Do you want me to do it for you?” Bethany asked.

“No, of course not.” The whole time they spoke, Kevin didn’t stop gawking at

Pauly Shore and Pauly Shore couldn’t have been any more oblivious. Brew Bar might as well have been a private club only Pauly and his friends were invited into despite being ten feet away from everyone else’s booths. When Pauly said something, the guys he was with would laugh, and then so would Pauly. Kevin heard the distinctive cackle he’d only ever heard on screen and Bethany could’ve sworn she saw Kevin shiver. He was swooning over Pauly Shore – she couldn’t remember the last time Kevin looked at her that way.

Kevin was passionate about his hobbies. Bethany, on the other hand, didn’t have many things she liked for herself. She always focused more on work, and prior to that, nursing school. For her, Kevin felt like someone she just happened to be with, someone she spent her limited free time around, but not necessarily someone she connected with, though she’d never say it out loud. Bethany hadn’t realized it until it was too late that she’d been with Kevin for so long marriage had become inevitable. Owed. Everyone,

112 including – especially – her parents, kept asking about it. Neither were getting any younger.

“Is Pauly Shore supposed to be nice? Or is he a jerk?” Bethany asked.

“I don’t know.”

The young blonde waitress approached the table with a pitcher. Spanning from her elbow to her wrist was an elaborately detailed tattoo of Frankenstein’s Bride. Bethany stared into the photo-realistic eyes of the monster to avoid looking at the server’s stretched, gauged earlobes. Ice cubes tumbled into Bethany’s glass and splashed droplets onto her hand and the table. Kevin stole glances at the waitress’s low cut shirt, unaware of how poorly he hid it.

“Your appetizer should be coming right up,” the waitress said. “Can I get you anything else?”

“I’ll take another.” Kevin pointed to his empty Tuesday Special $5 Strawberry

Margarita they advertised on a chalkboard at the door. “Thanks.” When the waitress left, he went back to admiring Pauly Shore.

“So I guess I’m the one driving home then?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “I thought that was implied when I started drinking and you got water.”

“I only got water because you ordered alcohol first. Don’t you think I wanted to drink, too?” Her fingers hurt along the creases where she’d clutched and clenched heavy furniture. One of her left knuckles got smashed into the railing as they brought up the couch and now she thought it looked a little bruised, especially near her engagement ring.

The more she stared at it, the more it bothered her. “I worked just as hard as you did

113 today. Are you even going to be sober enough to help me move the couch when we get back? I don’t want to leave it out there for everyone to see.”

She imagined the gigantic, fluffy sofa still sitting there. The thing she liked most about it, as opposed to either of their old hand-me-downs, was that there was plenty of room for two. Kevin spent all of his time watching – studying, as he claimed – movies.

He’d stay in, stretch out, and leave absolutely no room for Bethany. She just wanted to sit down without cramming herself in the space behind him or bunched up by his old socks, but he never seemed to notice. Or maybe, she thought, he didn’t care.

Bethany chose this couch from all the others at the store not just because it’d match the hardwood and really tie their whole living room together, but because now they could both sit in comfort. Or lie down. Or sprawl out. They had options.

“Go tell him about one of your movie ideas,” Bethany said. “This could be your

‘in’ to Hollywood.” She wanted to throttle Kevin for not taking an opportunity – any opportunity – to start his screenwriting career. It had been a unique aspiration when they were still in school, a refreshing change from all of the boring, cookie-cutter engineering and accounting majors she’d dated before, but Kevin’s film degree turned into an expensive encyclopedic knowledge of useless pop culture trivia. The romantic notion of him one day standing on stage to accept an Oscar, thanking Bethany for always believing in him was shaping up to be a pipe dream.

The sad thing was Bethany thought Kevin had a lot of good ideas. One of them, she thought, would make a perfect summer blockbuster. Nikola Tesla, Charlie Chaplin,

Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, and the turns-out-he’s-not-dead, Harry Houdini, team up to overthrow the Nazis before they rise to power. At the end of it, through a rousing

114 speech where they all combine their greatness, they’d inspire Hitler to return to his art studies. But Kevin never wrote a word because he always claimed he had to do more research before starting. When he lost his temp job last year he said he was really going to focus and buckle down, but he just bought a ring with the last bit of his savings and proposed. They’d lived off Bethany’s overtime income from the hospital ever since.

“He doesn’t care about my movie ideas,” Kevin said. “I’m a nobody.”

“Don’t you think he’d be perfect for that one you were talking about? What did you say it was like? Big Momma’s House meets The Town?”

“Which one? The one about the parkour bank robber who dresses in fat suits as a disguise? It’s more Mrs. Doubtfire meets Heat. I think Pauly’s too old to play the main character, he couldn’t do the stunts, it’s a very physical role…but maybe…maybe he could play the funny sidekick, Jizzy.”

The waitress returned with another Tuesday Special $5 Strawberry Margarita and a heaping appetizer platter of loaded tater tots. Bethany picked up her fork and dug in, fighting to pull one out of the golden mess, tendrils of cheese and sprinkles of scallions tugging back.

“But Pauly’s probably tired of being typecast as the funny friend,” Kevin added.

“You never know.” Bethany’s face got hot and she wanted to change the subject before she got angry because there were so many better reasons to be mad at Kevin, and this was such a stupid, stupid reason. “Anyway, what’re we going to do about the couch?

Are you sure Rob can’t come help?”

“Maybe I should buy Pauly Shore a drink. That’s smooth, right?”

115

“Sure,” Bethany said. She herded a couple of bacon bits to the edge of the plate and scooped them onto her fork. “So what’d you think about Rob helping move the couch?” But Kevin didn’t pay any attention to her; he didn’t care what she had to say.

She started to think he hadn’t cared about anything she’d had to say for a long time. It was maddening to speak with no one listening. “The longer you talk about this the more annoying it is. Either make a move, or don’t. You never know what might happen if you don’t try.” And though she could hear her words, she wasn’t sure to whom she was talking to now. She clutched her silverware so tight she was afraid her palms might bleed.

How could Kevin be a screenwriter if he couldn’t talk to Pauly Shore? How could

Kevin help support her? Or be the father of her children? What was there to be afraid of?

It was just Pauly Shore.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.

“I can’t.” Kevin laughed. “I’m freaking out. I can hear his voice. He’s right there.”

“Seriously?”

“I’m going to get my food in a takeout box. There’s no way I can keep this down.

You can still eat here if you’re hungry, though.”

Bethany didn’t want to, but she had to because she was hungry and didn’t want to eat in the hallway on the couch. They hadn’t unpacked chairs for the kitchen; they were buried behind their bed frame near the front of the truck. While she ate alone, Kevin kept drinking. She sunk her teeth into the burger she ordered and noticed something she’d never noticed before about Kevin: all of his features hung slightly to the left, as if a

116 talented artist were rushed and working in pen when they sketched the blueprint for his head.

Every time the waitress returned, Kevin ordered another drink and pretended not to be lost in her cleavage. This was supposed to be her soul mate, but now she could spot all of those fatal flaws in his exterior, the massive chips in his pristine paintjob, the cracks that let everything good spill out. She knew she wouldn’t be able to see him any other way. Bethany wondered if he’d be better suited for the tatted blonde waitress, if she’d be a better match for him than Bethany was. Maybe the girl didn’t want to leave the familiar surroundings of the college town, maybe she’d be satisfied having a creative partner that squandered his talent by never creating, maybe that girl could help him get the couch through the door.

Bethany asked herself if marriage really was just settling after all? It was deciding that the thing you had in that exact moment was going to be the best thing for you for the rest of your life, but who could ever speak with such authority? People changed all of the time. Bethany felt like she’d changed so much, especially since she was in nursing school. Now she was a victim to the easy temptation of routine. Sure, there was probably someone better out there for her – a million better someones – but searching was too hard, required too much energy. She had resigned herself to live with this in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, till death did them part. Wasn’t this what she’d always wanted?

One foot after the other, she felt herself float across the room to Pauly Shore’s table. Behind her, she knew, Kevin sat with a dropped shocked jaw and bated breath to see what would happen. He never thought she’d go over. She didn’t think she would

117 either, but if he wouldn’t take control of his life, she’d take control of it for him. Pauly

Shore’s friends drummed on the table, mid-chorus of an Irish drinking song, and didn’t notice that she wasn’t the waitress standing there. Pauly Shore looked up first and smiled:

“Hi?”

Bethany didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t even really thought about what she was doing and now she felt silly. “Are you Pauly Shore?” She searched for the movies

Kevin said he’d been in, but drew a blank. “From The Goofy Movie?”

Pauly Shore laughed and then so did his friends.

“See?” The man to Pauly’s right, the one with heavy eyelids, said. “I told you, dude. He gets this everywhere.”

“I’m not Pauly Shore,” Pauly Shore said. “Do you really think I look like him?”

His friends cracked up. “Would it help if I looked like him?”

“Oh,” Bethany said. “No, I just thought…” She turned to face Kevin, but he slunk in the booth and turned away as if denying her existence. His straw slurped the end of another Tuesday Special $5 Strawberry Margarita. “Sorry.”

“Wait a second,” Pauly Shore’s other friend, the one with the oily nose, said. “He can be Pauly Shore for you tonight, honey.”

“Come on, Jim.” Pauly Shore nudged his buddy’s ribs. “I’m sorry about him. He just…” They all laughed again. “He’s Jim.”

***

Bethany and Kevin made their way up the fourth floor stairway of their new apartment complex. Kevin panted and leaned on the railing to steady himself. “Look, I’m sorry for whatever I did. Slow down. I don’t even know what I did wrong. I didn’t do anything.”

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“I don’t want to do this.” Bethany took out her keys and unlatched the locks. The couch stood outside their door looking bigger and heavier. It exhausted Bethany to even look at it.

“Please, let’s give this another try.” Kevin went to one end and petted the suede plush armrest like it was a cat. “I can do this. I can do better this time.” His slurred voice came out too loud. He’d wake the neighbors.

“I don’t want to give it another try. We’ve tried and tried and I can’t do it. I’ve tried enough.” Bethany stepped in and put her purse on the floor because there was nowhere else to put it. She didn’t know where she’d lie down for the night. When Kevin didn’t follow, she considered locking him out and leaving him to sleep in the hallway alone. He could sprawl out as much as he wanted.

“We’ve got each other, right?” Kevin said to Bethany as she stepped outside. Her arms folded across her chest. “That’s all we need. We can get through this.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“No?”

“No.”

“I think it’ll work.” Kevin bent down to lift his end and waited for Bethany to do the same.

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CHAPTER XII

JOJO THE SIGN-LANGUAGE GORILLA ABDUCTED

BY DELUSIONAL TRAINER

JoJo “The Greatest Ape™,” the phenomenal primate known for her incredible ability to communicate using over 1,500 gestures in sign language, was kidnapped last night.

Dr. Linda Graves, the primary researcher with the Ape Institution, has been employed with the privately funded entity for the last twenty-five years and is the sole suspect. She was arrested around 1 a.m. last night at Quay Dock waiting for a cargo boat that she had illegally bribed to transport her and JoJo to Maui, where she intended to live in secret with the gorilla.

Police say the gorilla was taken from her cage around 9 p.m. and was transported, via the front seat of Graves’ Jeep Wrangler, to the local drive-in showing of Mr. Meow-gi

Saves Christmas. Authorities were called to the scene after the ape attempted to flip a family of four’s minivan when it saw their dog in the backseat. The family and their vehicle were unharmed and first responders were unable to locate Graves or JoJo.

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Kim Tedford, an employee working the drive-thru at The Shaky Shakin’ Shake

Shack, said that they were visited by JoJo around 10:15 p.m., and that the primate assaulted her with one of the beverages Graves had purchased.

“Yeah, I’d say it was probably one of the last things I expected to happen to me on the late shift,” Tedford noted. “All I asked was, ‘wow, is that a real gorilla?’ And then it whipped the banana shake at me. We had to stay late to get it all cleaned up.”

Their whereabouts from there are unclear, but several eyewitnesses claim they visited an elementary school playground and Dawson’s Hill. Adrienne Riggs, a student at

Northward High School, was at Dawson’s Hill at 12:30 a.m. and told police that Graves laid on the hood of her car with the gorilla, staring at the stars “like they were going to make out, or something.”

Last week, it was announced that the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services branch of the USDA was shutting down the Ape Institution’s facilities for their discovery of gross misconduct amongst the researchers.

In the press release, the USDA claimed they found the ape was in “poor health” with “little exercise” and gorging on a human-like diet that included “chocolates” and

“salted meats.”

Instead of regular play, the lethargic gorilla would nap and watch countless hours of television. A female in the wild normally weighs 150-200 lbs, however JoJo is now catalogued to be at a staggering 350.

Graves had been investigated once before, a decade ago, after numerous disgruntled volunteers cited “degrading harassment, mostly in a sexual manner,” for their cause of leave. The media dubbed the complaint “The Nipple Incident” after headlines

121 picked up on a specific event of handlers being forced to expose themselves to the gorilla.

The internal Board of Operations released a statement soon after defending Graves’ work: “We have the utmost confidence in Dr. Graves’ experimentation and we trust that she handles herself and JoJo: The Greatest Ape™, with professionalism and care.”

The Ape Institution refused to comment on Graves’ latest indiscretions, but assured the public that “JoJo: The Greatest Ape™ is safe, and back in good hands.”

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CHAPTER XIII

THE INTRUDER / THE TARGET

The new millennium was just hours away when the window at the front of the house shattered. Olivia sat up in a cold sweat, shaking George awake. “Someone’s in the house. Someone’s in the house, I just heard someone break in.” Not even a moment passed before she’d leapt to her feet and tried to form a barricade.

“Well wait, why are you locking the door?” George undid the latch. “Your mother’s in the house. We’ve got to make sure she’s all right. Let me see what’s happening.”

***

They were just going home from the studio to say goodnight to their son, Sean.

Bang! Window. Spider-web crack on glass.

Bang! Bang! Left side of back. Like sledgehammers on fire. Blood.

Bang! Bang! Left shoulder. Like wrecking balls of barbed wire. Blood.

“I’m shot. I’m shot.” The blood. Crimson oozing from five holes, two in the back, two in the shoulder, mouth. Cassettes, final mix of “Walking On Thin Ice” slide across the sidewalk. Final creative endeavor. Jay, the Dakota concierge, drags The Target into the reception area ripping open the blood-stained shirt to make a tourniquet, but it’s too

123 bad. Soon-to-be-widow shrieking. Jay takes off his jacket instead, Dakota uniform, and covers The Target’s chest. Takes off blood-covered glasses, lenses splattered and fractured. Screams for police.

The blood. Jose, the Dakota doorman, shakes the gun out of The Shooter’s hand and kicks it like a ball. Mark David Chapman, 25-year-old white male, heavyset, glasses, security guard from Honolulu. Calm, cool, collected, takes off his coat and hat to show he has nothing to hide. Sits on the sidewalk reading Salinger. Jose, the Dakota doorman, screams: “Do you know what you’ve just done?”

“Yes, I just shot John Lennon.”

***

There were shards of glass at the feet of the hooded man shrouded in the darkness of the foyer. The heavy stone wing from George and Olivia’s garden statue of St. Michael was off to the side, the key to his entry. In one of The Intruder’s hands was St. Michael’s stolen spear, the one he mythically used to slay the dragon, in the other hand of The

Intruder was a knife. “GET DOWN HERE!” The Intruder screamed, the echo ringing off the walls of the mansion.

GEt DOWn HERe!

Get DOwn HEre.

Get Down Here.

get down here.

“What do you want?” George began to chant under his breath. Spirituality was the only weapon he knew how to wield.

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“You know what I want!” In a psychotic state, The Intruder pulled back his coverings for a grand reveal, but he was nothing more than a tall, blond, young stranger.

The Beatles were witches and he was on a mission from god to stop them all, starting with George Harrison.

***

Charter Arms Undercover Double Action Revolver, .38 Special with 2” barrel, stainless steel, fixed sights, 5-round cylinder, and rubber finger-groove grips. Sleek, stealthy, and compact, so it’s easy to conceal and carry for your everyday needs. Don’t forget to stock up on hollow-point bullets, which are made to maximize stopping power. With their patented designed pit, they allow the bullet to expand upon entering The Target in order to decrease penetration and disrupt more tissue as it travels through The Target. These bad boys are made to maximize tissue damage and blood loss or shock.

***

The Intruder ran, charged really, until George was flat on his back with The Intruder lying on top of him in the worst way. St. Michael’s spear had been dropped, but the knife plunged into George’s chest over and over again. Over and over again. Over and over again. No matter how much George struggled, he couldn’t get The Intruder off, and that’s when something took over Olivia.

The voice of her father seemed to beam into the room, guiding her to the fireplace where she picked up the poker and brandished it like The Intruder had with the spear of

St. Michael, like St. Michael had once used to slay the dragon. Her father often tried to get her to play baseball since he was such a big fan. “Follow through,” he’d yell from the stands, wishing he had a son.

125

***

The “Weaver Stance,” also known as the “combat stance,” is broken down into two main components: the first involves holding the pistol or revolver with both hands, using the supporting hand to wrap around the shooting hand. The elbow of the shooting arm must be slightly bent, almost to the point of being locked out, while the support elbow is significantly bent directly downwards. The Shooter will then push forward with their shooting hand while the support hand provides backwards pressure on the firearm. This is to better allow the tension to lessen and control any muzzle flip when the gun is fired, allowing for faster follow-up shots.

The second component of the stance is for the rest of the body, placing the feet in a boxing way. The non-shooting side of the body should have a foot slightly ahead of the shooting side’s foot. For instance, if a person is right-handed, they will have their right foot angled out to approximately forty-five degrees to the rear side at shoulder length.

The majority of The Shooter’s weight will be on the forward foot, with the forward knee bent slightly and the rear leg almost straight.

As far as the upper torso goes, it should be leaning forward at the hips with the shoulders aimed at the front foot. Thanks to the rear foot, some recoil will be absorbed which will also allow, due to the positioning, for rapid changes in direction if needed.

Both knees should have a slight bend with weight distributed as if The Shooter is preparing to be pushed backward. A left-handed Shooter would reverse the hands and footing accordingly.

***

126

Olivia made sure to swing the metal fireplace poker against The Intruder’s head as many times as he’d stabbed her husband. The red of his blood, of George’s blood, seemed so crude and harsh compared to The Intruder’s light hair. The bashing was enough to get him off George, which to Olivia was all that mattered, but then she found The Intruder’s large hands around her throat and George, who was just beginning to get comfortable with the idea that the nightmare was over, forced himself up on The Intruder’s back.

Wrestling The Intruder to the ground, George pinned him and screamed: “I’ve got the knife! I’ve got the knife!”

The knife? Olivia thought in a haze. What knife?

***

Officers Spiro and Cullen hear the shots and arrive within two minutes. They handcuff

The Shooter; toss him in the back seat of the squad car. No resisting arrest, no fleeing, no guilt for the guilty. Officers Frauenberger and Palma a few minutes later. Jay, the

Dakota concierge, is playing in the blood pool for nothing. Soaked clothes. No time to waste. Officer Moran helps Frauenberger and Palma carry The Target to their car, sirens on blast to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. Officer Moran asks: “Are you

John Lennon?”

Nod. “Yes.” Fame.

Then nothing anymore.

Lost consciousness.

***

The whole house gathered amidst commotion of the evening and two new employees of the Harrison estate stood in disbelief as paramedics stretchered out the Mr. and Mrs.

127

George asked them as he went by with a bloodstained, toothy grin: “What do you think of the job so far?”

***

Dr. Stephan Lynn fresh off a 13-hour shift looks at the clock. Called back in. Few before

11:00 PM. No pulse, no breathing. Two other doctors, a nurse, and three other medical attendants spar with death for fifteen minutes. Desperation down for the count. Soon-to- be-widow in shock at the door while “All My Loving” serendipitously comes on the radio. Dr. Lynn cuts open the chest, the best way to get to the heart, massage it. Restore circulation to virtually destroyed blood vessels. Dr. Stephen Lynn fresh off a 13-hour shift looks at the clock. 11:15 PM. Dead on arrival. City morgue at 520 First Avenue autopsy – cause of death – hypovolemic shock, caused by the loss of more than 80% of blood volume due to multiple through-and-through gunshot wounds to the chest and aortic arch.

Dr. Lynn fresh off a 13-hour shift says: “If he had been shot this way in the middle of the operating room with a whole team of surgeons ready to work on him…he still wouldn’t have survived his injuries.” Nearly every bullet would have been fatal by itself.

***

Afterwards, at the National Health Hospital, George and Olivia’s rickety wheelchairs raced down sterile white halls like chariots. Frigid shock chilling their bones, they were strapped into beds in the same room, a curtain drawn to shield. George had a collapsed lung, stabbed over forty times. Olivia asked: “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried to kill somebody before.”

128

“No, I haven’t either.”

***

Dr. Stephan Lynn, fresh off a 13-hour shift lets the widow know. “Oh no, no, no, no…tell me it’s not true!” And she lies down and hits her head against the floor, only stopping when the nurse gives the widow her late husband’s wedding ring. Wiped the blood off.

David Geffen takes the widow home.

The widow requests that the hospital wait on telling the media that her husband has died until she tells her five-year-old son waiting at home, since he’s probably watching television and she didn’t want him to learn of his father’s death from a TV announcement.

[“An unspeakable tragedy confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John

Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.” – Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football, December 8, 1980]

***

George and Olivia sat there in silence listening to their steady heartbeats almost in sync on their monitors. Both had been hoping they’d never have to come back to a hospital again. They’d spent so many hours in there over the past few years for George’s cancer treatment and now that it was finally in remission, they thought they were free of pinpricks and tubes and tests.

“You know,” George began with a wheezing cough. “I was lying there and I was thinking: I can’t believe it. After everything that happened to me, I’m going to get murdered. I’m being murdered in my own home…and since I’m being murdered and I’m

129 going to die, I better start letting go of this life and I better start doing what I’ve been practicing my whole life so I can leave my body the way I want to.”

Olivia smiled, so brilliantly powerless in the face of his end. What a night. The

New Year and Millennium came. George was so determined.

130

CHAPTER XIV

WHEN YOU WISH UPON A STAR

If I were a copyright lawyer for Disney, I’d do my best to preserve the purity and wholesomeness of their intellectual properties. I’d bust head shops for Rastafarian

Mickey Mouse pipes, with their dreadlocks and painted bloodshot eyes. I’ll tell them: that privilege is for authorized retailers only.

At sex stores, I’d make them throw away their knock-off kinky character costumes that hang from plastic packaging on racks in the back. You’re infringing on the trademarks owned by the Walt Disney Company, I’ll say as I thrust a cease-and-desist in their face.

Mom-and-pop bakeries would have to scrape off their sugary frosting with crude

Donald and Daisy Ducks on birthday cakes. I don’t care if Kylie only turns seven once, you have to obtain written or verbal permission first. It’s the law.

Children’s cancer wards, with those grotesque paintings of Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar icons on the walls would be scrubbed and purged. If I were there when men in ill-fitting Spider-Man or Wolverine costumes came to visit, I’d save the bald, shriveled children and drive away the phony imitations. Perhaps, I’d suggest, you should arrange for a television to be set up and a home video recording purchased from a legal vendor to

131 depict these characters. However, each child should have an official copy bought on their behalf, as group viewings in an area like this are strictly prohibited.

I would dress like Walt with a combed over pompadour, pencil mustache, tailored suit, and all-knowing smile. Everyday I’d walk like Steamboat Willy, loose limbed, whistling “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” or “It’s A Small World.” I’d marry a girl named

Tinkerbell and she’d have fire-red hair like Ariel, full lips like Pocahontas, exotic skin like Jasmine, and the bold confidence of Mulan. She’d be impressed by my important occupation.

Our children would learn valuable lessons from the likes of Scar, Captain Hook,

Cruella DeVille, and Gaston: that evil will always be thwarted. Our home would be modeled around Cinderella’s Castle. My Volkswagen Beetle – with the vanity license plate: MOUSKTR – would be customized so half would be red and the other half black, and I’d mount two circular ears to the hood. There would be no expense spared in adorning it with souvenirs from Orlando, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and of course, Anaheim. Every July, I’d embark on the cruise.

One day, Walt will rise from the dead to help defend his rights and keep his work from entering the public domain. They’ll thaw him out from the Vault and he’ll thank me and he’ll tell me he’s proud of me. That’s all I want. Maybe one day they’ll make a movie about it.

132

CHAPTER XV

POP THOUGHTS

Warning: the delicious taste of convenient artifice is highly addictive. Like fast food,

celebrity is best consumed as quickly as possible, while they’re still hot, without giving

much thought as to what it is you’re doing. They’re not meant to fill you up or provide

nutritional value of any sort.

Good. Now look into the camera and say: Mm, I’m lovin’ it.

***

Sometimes I Mistake My Memories for Stuff I Saw on TV

Did my mom tell me not to play ball in the house or was that Mrs. Brady? Am I afraid of the water because of that summer of shark attacks or was that Jaws? And is Tim Curry responsible for my repulsion to clowns and attraction to transvestites? John Williams scores my mundane. Whenever I successfully change lanes in traffic I feel like I’m James

Bond. I forgive you, Mel Gibson. I’ve never seen a prostitute as attractive as Julia

Roberts, but I’ve seen cab drivers that might go on murder sprees like Robert DeNiro. I might’ve even been one.

***

133

My Therapist Tells Me I Have Good Ideas for Movie Sequels

Indiana Jones – Where Did I Put That Green Dragon Crescent Blade? (Working Title)

Indy attempts reconciliation with his former sidekick turned kickass adventurer: Short

Round, on a search for Oriental treasure. Reboot the franchise with a charming ethnic actor. Our old, grizzled hero would acknowledge the events of Temple of Doom where he dragged an orphaned child into a cult that ripped out people’s hearts and how he was an awful father figure who abandoned a kid at a time when all he really needed was someone to be a role model for him. Indy will have to take responsibility for what he’s done.

Castaway 2 – Washed Up

Tom Hanks gets scary news that the weird mole growing between his shoulder blades is cancerous from years of unprotected exposure to the sun. Every relationship he’s had since returning to the mainland has failed due to his difficulty in finding someone comfortable with his extreme volleyball fetish. Even if trauma gets buried deep, it finds a way to come home.

Two Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The long-awaited sequel where it turns out Jack Nicholson didn’t die, but is still catatonic. It’s like an elderly Weekend at Bernie’s as Danny DeVito and Christopher

Lloyd run Jack’s limp body around the busy city to take him out on a fishing trip.

Everyone should have a feel good moment at the end knowing just because you’re old and crazy doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun.

134

The Breakfast Club – Back to Shermer High

Each Brat Pack member has a series of sad epiphanies as they realize they’ve fulfilled the stereotypical destiny they rebelled against in their youth. Now they’re disillusioned that they’ve unknowingly set their children on the exact same paths to follow. None of us escapes becoming our parents, or our favorite movie characters.

***

Tom Bergeron Has A Restraining Order Against Me

I want Michael Clarke Duncan to be my bodyguard. I want to skateboard with Jason Lee.

I want to talk about jail time with Marta Stewart. I want to play baseball with “Macho

Man” Randy Savage. I want to learn carpentry from Harrison Ford. I want to golf nine holes with Alice Cooper. I want to discuss the intricacies of hotel management with Paris

Hilton. I want to race racecars with George Harrison. I want to form a bluegrass band with Steve Martin. I want to be famous just because.

***

Hiding Underground

Whatever happened to Warren Beatty, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson,

Bridget Fonda, Linda Fiorentino, Rick Moranis, and Joe Pesci? What about Dharma from

Dharma and Greg? The answer, depending on when you read this is: they’re dead. And, if even further along: who?

***

135

Where’s My Ampersand?

Martin & Amos; Abbot & Costello; Martin & Lewis; Bill & Ted; Beavis & Butthead;

Laverne & Shirley; Jay & Silent Bob; Rogen & Franco; Spade & Farley; Will & Grace;

Lennon & McCartney; Mickey & Mallory; Toupin & John; Tango & Cash; Kato & Nash;

Rizzoli & Isles; Beyonce & Jay-Z; Rihanna & Brown; Gomez & Bieber; Turner &

Hooch; Jagger & Richards. Me &

***

You Don’t Recognize Me? I’m the 3rd Guy Killed in Friday the 13th Part 8

I don’t know the metric system but I can name all of the members of the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys and if that’s not American I don’t know what is. Gwen Stefani deserves a thank you for teaching an entire generation to spell the word “banana.” If there were ever a Saved by the Bell reunion episode, A.C. Slater would be in prison on domestic abuse charges and Zack Morris would probably be President. Time out. Jason

Statham is so cool we’ve all forgotten he’s balding. I want to see Doctor Who and James

Bond and Austin Powers team up in a time-travel adventure since they’re Britain’s

Greatest Heroes. When I’m dead via suicide by Pop Rocks and Pepsi, I want people to be convinced that it was all a hoax, and that I’m really sitting outside of a gas station in

Arkansas with Elvis, Tupac, and Andy Kaufman.

***

My Guilty Pleasure is Pauly Shore Movies

I used to hate sports. Well, first I loved them, and then I hated them. Now I like them again. I remember when I was a kid I actually used to believe that Space Jam and White

Men Can’t Jump and Caddyshack weren’t all documentaries. Sports are a thinking man’s

136 spectacle – I can either watch passively, allowing my mind to wander while my eyes absorb the action, perfect for unwinding after a hard day of work with a cold Bud-weis- er, or I can study each movement and analyze every play, boiling it down to a science of poetry in motion with statistical quantification. What’s not to like? You wouldn’t understand. Sometimes I don’t. I’ve been known not to.

***

All My Heroes Are Androgynous

There should’ve been a crossover episode between The Mighty Boosh and The Flight of the Conchords; 30 Rock and Parks & Rec; Catfish and To Catch A Predator; Mad Men and Full House where the firm becomes Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Gladstone, and

Katsopolis. If you were a toy and I pulled a string on your back, what would be the phrase you’d say? Are Josh Duhammel and Timothy Olyphant two separate people?

When I think of proper running form I refer to Robert Patrick’s stride in Terminator 2:

Judgment Day. If I were on Gilligan’s Island I would’ve killed Gilligan before the end of the first season. The tribe, and the rest, have spoken. The stars on the Hollywood Walk of

Fame use shoe prints and handprints and signatures because those are the three things the dark priestess required to complete the resurrection spell.

***

O. Henry’s Pitch for The Outer Limits

M. Night Shymalan and Rod Serling sit in gridlocked traffic for so long that not only have they run out of polite chitchat, but they also can’t even remember where it was they were headed. No exit anywhere soon to get off, and Serling has to pee, so they start talking, naturally, about death. Every driver within screaming distance has windows

137 tinted to the point of obscurity – nothing more than amorphous shadows in boxes. For all

M. Night and Serling know, the cars and the people inside of them, everything, could be lifeless cardboard cutouts or motionless mannequin decoys, but it’s far too cold to get out and walk, or even to roll down the windows to check. What a nightmare. After eternity, they idle by the crash, terrified to find that the corpses pulled from the wreckage are their own…or are they? Thank you, I hope I passed the audition.

***

Pay The Westboro Baptist Church To Protest My Funeral

It would take way more than one last breath to say: “hold me now I’m six feet from the edge and I’m thinking maybe six feet ain’t so far down.” I’ve decided I’d rather be The

Fonz than James Dean, because The Fonz was the Ryan Gosling of his time. Dustin

Hoffman is the ugliest woman ever. Nostalgia is a Pavlovian Response, but the thing about Pavlov’s dogs that they left out of the history books is they had holes drilled into their faces and tubes sewn into their cheeks to measure the production of their salivary glands. I hope the afterlife is nothing like the way it was shown in Beetlejuice, or if it is, that they have lots of Highlights magazines.

***

I Wish I Were As Talented As Donald Glover

Why did we all just agree that Liam Neeson was a tough guy all of a sudden? MMA probably owes a lot of its success to Fight Club. How much would it cost for Johnny

Depp to come to my house in full Edward Scissorhands costume just to trim my hedges?

And now that you mention it, how does Captain Jack Sparrow keep his eyeliner so pristine? My mother used to punish me with The Sound of Music. Tim Allen stole his

138 grunts from Scooby-Doo. They should wait until the actresses of Gilmore Girls are elderly so they can relaunch the series and call it Golden Gilmore Girls. Melissa Joan

Hart was the Zooey Deschanel of the 90s. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles give off serious Wu Tang vibes. Have you ever met someone that looks like Jim Henson made them? Jonathan Banks is a human version of Oscar the Grouch and Maggie Gyllenhall is the non-felt form of Miss Piggy, no offense, it’s in the eyes and the nose. Is this thing on?

***

Please God, Let Me Be On A Network With More Than Two Letters

Did I get the part? Cate Blanchett or Tilda Swinton – which one looks like David Bowie again? When is disco going to make a comeback? You want me to parallel park? What do you think I am, one of those Fast and the Furious stunt drivers? If you ate a Gusher and it turned your head into a fruit, which fruit would you want it to be? Did you know it’s considered child abuse in all 50 states to show your children Star Wars Episodes 1-3 before Episodes 4-6? When will Squidward kill himself? When is Bruce Willis or Eddie

Murphy going to make another album? Is the Snuggle bear a boy or a girl? Have you ever noticed there are never any streakers at hockey games? How did John Travolta get so thick between Saturday Night Fever and Pulp Fiction? Will this thickening happen to me? To all of us?

***

The Lowest Form of Fame is Local TV News Anchor

My childhood memories are late night infomercials for useless kitchen appliances and special multi-disc compilation albums where you get two for the price of one (plus $5.95 for postage and handling, that’s two for the price of one, plus $5.95 for postage and

139 handling, call now). When I complain everyone tells me to stop whining, but no one ever says that to a blues singer. Why did the 2004 Punisher starring Tom Jane have a skull emblem that became such a fashion icon for soldiers and gun nuts? If daytime television commercials are to be believed, the only people watching are those inflicted with mesothelioma. Let’s say the Bowie knife was named after David Bowie. What would it look like? What magical powers does David Boreanaz have to make his shows run for so long?

***

How I Spent My Summer Vacation Is

Are we still rolling? I went to go live in the bar from Cheers because I wanted to be where everyone knew my name and our troubles were all the same, but there were only so many times I could take everyone yelling out: “Norm!” before I started to lose it and craved tossed salad and scrambled eggs.

I went to a museum and saw Lady Gaga’s meat dress. They have it in a see-thru freezer.

Nobody thought to preserve it right away, so there are spots on it that rotted brown and have holes burrowed into it by maggots. They spray painted most of those parts red so you can barely tell, but I could. I made sure everyone noticed.

I ate at Chick-Fil-A every day, except Sundays, until I realized that I hate Chick-Fil-A, not for their family values or homophobia, but because of their horrifying marketing.

Cows, which we have mass bred for slaughter, have become sentient and so desperate for survival that they’ve evolved and taken to the streets to pull off clever guerilla vandalism

140 tactics to sabotage other animals for consumption instead of themselves. It’s too depressing. Cut.

***

Weekend Binge

One of the greatest pleasures of life is watching a sitcom when it’s in that sweet spot, the season 3-5 run, where they’ve got everything up, firing on all cylinders, every character operating at peak hilarious efficiency, and each plot feeling grounded enough for payoff.

Writers have the voices and tone down, the showrunner has usually been there since the beginning, and if there had been any recasting done prior, it was usually for the best.

Maybe there’s a new quirky character filling a void everyone felt but couldn’t put their finger on. I’m still waiting for that same state of bliss and nirvana in real life where everything functions effortlessly.

***

That One Guy, From That One Thing

I’d like to thank the Academy. I believe that the Heat Miser and Snow Miser are responsible for global warming and if we just call Mother Nature she can sort this whole mess out. Game show idea: Guess How Tall The Celebrity Is! The rush of superiority that comes from watching TV game shows and cheering for the failure of contestants after you said the right answer and yelled it at the screen has got to be on par with the high of doing heroin. If I were a street artist I’d transform the Statue of Liberty into the lady in blue robes at the beginning of the Columbia Studios card. Remember when we all loved

Will Smith? I can’t wait for Alf to come back as a gritty HBO series remake with

Guillermo del Toro at the helm. Why don’t they make Saturday morning cartoons out of

141 summer blockbusters anymore? We deserve a kid-friendly 2D Taken featuring a vaguely

Liam Neeson-esque character punching Bavarian snakemen. Yes, I’m still watching. I’ll always be watching. Where else would I go? What else would I do?

142

CHAPTER XVI

HIS STORY IN THE DUMPSTER DESK

To summarize his story as quickly as possible, it was about his father, who was sort of the villain of the piece, because he would hit the narrator often while the narrator’s mother watched, and there was never any good reason as to why, aside from habit. The narrator’s father would scream and yell and stomp and froth while his voice gave way to a tremor that would disrupt him like static on an old timey radio. It all had something to do with the father’s past, the things he saw, and the things he’d done. The father’s veins would bulge from his neck and the center of his forehead and his face would go bright red like a plump, ripe raspberry. Poor mother would lean dizzy against the doorframe and observe from a distance her weeping child in soiled pajamas. Afterwards, she’d come in and clean the sheets of the narrator, making him promise never to tell.

It was good. Really deep and award worthy. Publishable.

If you’d read it, there was a chance you’d sympathize with him. At least he hoped that was the case. What he feared was you’d read it and think his father was a bad man because of what he did at night when he claimed he was working the graveyard shift. Or that his mother was a coward because she never stood up for herself; but when her husband ran off the second time, she left her child, the narrator, alone for two months to

143 go find him. The writer might have been too close to the situation to have an objective perspective, some might say he was trying to cover for their sins, but he did his best to present it without judgment. It was up for the reader to decide.

The writer embarked on making descriptions feel like the snapshots of pain he kept behind his eyes, but it proved to be harder than he thought. He’d spent so long trying to forget. Somehow, he did it, but he thinks he made a mistake while he was writing because he put too much of himself inside and now he doesn’t feel whole anymore.

What if a stranger found his main character unlikable? What would that mean for him?

There were clever symbolic allusions and analogies between the role of a father in the workplace and the homestead. It was a progressive, challenging, and controversial text. His word choice was precise and he stayed awake for months drafting revisions every evening after the cars stopped honking. As he paced and read aloud his work on his path from the front of the desk he found in the dumpster to the bucket he used for a bathroom, the carpet became stained and charred, worn down to the crosshatched lining.

This story wasn’t something thrown together at the last minute, it brewed in his mind for as long as he could remember and now that it was finished the author wasn’t sure what to do. Rest assured, by the time he was done, he felt born again, revitalized, refreshed.

He also fell into an inconsolable depression that rivaled his week in the psych ward when he was sixteen after he tried to kill himself with cold medicine and plastic bags. How does life just move on? He wasn’t done feeling yet. How can something evolve once it’s been given life and left the hands of the creator? The story didn’t need

144 him anymore, it became something alone and part of everything else at the same time, and he resented it for the ways it stood out and blended in.

Curled beneath covers, for three days without food or water, he scanned each and every line to relive the high. It was the best drug out there, and he should know since he’d had almost all of them. Experience was a writer’s best friend, he’d reasoned. He was a firm believer in getting out into the world for inspiration, getting his hands dirty. Of course, curiosity got the best of him, not vanity, and he eventually decided he had to show his hard work off to a few people. Just to see what they’d say.

His favorite barista was pretty and pierced, dyed and inked. She always covered her nametag when he came in, or went to the back so she wouldn’t have to deal with him.

But she returned, she always did, and he was there waiting. With trembling hands and a froggy voice he asked if she would read his story and extended the soggy manuscript.

What else could she do? She took it and asked: What can I get you today? When he said: nothing, she asked: would you please leave? Otherwise, she said, she’d have to call the cops. He loved her sense of humor.

It was a week to the second that he returned and waited in line until he got to her.

He wanted to give her enough time to fall in love with it the way he had. With caramel dripping from her fingertips, she smelled him before she saw him. All he said he wanted to know was if she read the story, and she humored him, she felt bad at seeing the obvious desperation behind his eyes, so she took pity and said: it was really good, and that was enough for both.

She wasn’t the only one he showed it to, the homeless man with the overstuffed garbage bag who waited outside the supermarket thought it was great too. That man also

145 claimed it was printed on surprisingly soft paper, so it made for an excellent pillow. He asked if the author would ever show it to his parents, but the homeless man didn’t understand that they wouldn’t want to read it. It was too personal. They’d hoped the author would be something better.

But the story had it all: intertwined exposition within the scene so it felt natural and engaging, characters that were intriguing, new, and most importantly – relatable. The conflict gave way to a thorough, satisfying, cathartic resolution that haunted the mind for days to follow. His title was short and succinct. The inciting incident was unexpected and unwelcome for the narrator, but gave the reader a naughty sense of delight. He knew how much people loved to see others struggle.

Secretly, he always felt like dialogue was his strongest asset. The reason it sounded authentic was because he used to record his father’s bellowing and grunting.

He’d hide the device underneath his pillow so when his father came into his room to do what he did, he had evidence he could hopefully someday present to a heroic policeman or hands-on teacher or all-seeing priest. His tape collection of muffled cries spanned his entire adolescence.

After the barista read his story, he offered to show her the tapes, but she declined and said enough was enough, and that she’d call the police if she ever saw him again. She started having her body builder girlfriend walk her to her car after she closed down the shop. Just in case. But the writer was only trying to share something meaningful; he played the tapes every night like a cacophonous profane lullaby. It was the only way he could fall asleep.

146

How would the author compare his work to other authors that have come before?

He’s not sure he could. He didn’t read much, at least not fiction, which is what his story was. The names and characters were changed, even if it was all inspired from real life. He supposed it’d be something similar to an epic, like Beowulf. But it was domestic like

Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His best efforts were made to give it a surreal vibe like a Franz

Kafka story, but it was realistic and emotionally driven like a Bronte novel. Not Emily’s.

His story was so much more than those – it was funny and smart, like Mark

Twain. It was a character study like Catcher in the Rye, and it was told from a first person past tense limited perspective, with the narrator often breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the reader. “And friend,” the author wrote, “the only thing my mother wasn’t indecisive with was her consumption of red wine and capsules, which she threw back from inside her ever-present menthol cloud.” He liked that his narrator called everyone

“friend,” just in case there was someone out there like him who was lonely and in need of a reason to hang on a little while longer. His narrator cared when no one else could. That was the power of art.

The author wanted to ask the barista if she could show his story to other people, maybe literary types that came in for fancy drinks, but she screamed any time she saw him coming. Then they found the homeless man one cold morning frozen to the sidewalk with his garbage bag overflowing. Inside were pop cans and aluminum siding he stole, but at the very bottom was also the story. This touched the author deeply.

Deciding to take a chance, the author went to the library to print off as many copies as he could before they figured out he didn’t have anything to pay for them with.

Copies started to turn up in his wake, like breadcrumbs on a trail he wasn’t sure he’d ever

147 be able to find his way back from. Street corners and telephone poles, job boards and nursing homes, playgrounds and movie theaters all had no less than three but no more than five. The most in any one location were wedged between the pages of assorted magazines at the gas station. Sometimes they were tucked between Ms. November and a

Catholic schoolgirl with a skirt that violated the dress code, and sometimes they were nestled between celebrities in suits or with bulging biceps clutched to a ball. It didn’t matter to the author where they were hidden as long as they were found.

A week after spreading them over the city, the author went to see if his copies were still there and to his delight they weren’t. Even the one that he hung from the bike rack near the animal shelter that’d been soaked in the rain and splashed by puddles from a passerby had been lost. He listened close to people’s conversations on the street to hear the buzz; surely the story was on everyone’s minds, hearts, and lips. But they pretended like they hadn’t read it, like they didn’t know what he’d done, who he was, the writer.

Pretend for a moment you read his story – a friend of a friend of a friend found it left behind on the seat they were about to sit down on in the subway. Somehow it made its way to you and you threw it underneath your junk mail for a few weeks before you grabbed it because you needed something to stare at for your commute. The story was surprising, not at all what was expected. Some might say addicting. You would. You couldn’t put it down, you missed your stop because you were so engrossed and invested.

The author would like that. When you finished, you felt as if you’d gone on a journey that you’d like to go on again, so you started over at the beginning.

You thought that the world needed to know about this amazing piece of work, a genuine future classic. Your eyes scanned for a name beneath the title, some indicator of

148 genius, but you were a little saddened to find it lacked a credit. You appreciated it from a distance and somehow, somewhere, the writer knew and this was good enough for him, friend. Just so long as you enjoyed it suddenly made it all worthwhile.

Maybe it’d take twenty, or fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand years after the author was dead and shriveled, decomposing in the ground and forgotten before someone would realize the significance of his story. He made peace with this. Archeologists would be on a recovery expedition and get excited at the prospect of discovering a textual relic beneath a dusty dig site in what was once the author’s city, but now was nothing more than a flattened desert. With chisels and toothbrushes, they’d push sand around the contours of the edges and use rubber gloves to handle it with care so as not to depreciate the quality of the parchment it was still miraculously printed on without flaw. Their eyes would well up and they’d know – they’d get it. Wow, they would tell each other as they exchanged candid glances. This was something special. This was art.

School boards and curriculums would mandate that the story should be required to be taught to all of the future children that ride in on their hover boots and flying scooters.

They’d scrutinize and analyze the text over their dry sustenance cubes that inflated into bountiful feasts with the addition of a single drop of water, or while they took their spring break on one of Saturn’s moons. The homeless man with the overstuffed bag told the author the last time they ever spoke that Titan was nice in autumn when the leaves started to change.

Historians will probably regard the author’s story as the piece of literature that marked the turning point in the Intergalactic War on the Robotic Singularity Revolution.

All bloodshed was halted by the power of the story’s message. The writer confided to the

149 homeless man that this was the true desire for all artists: longevity, legacy, and fame after being long gone. The best part was that he would be free of potential embarrassment, of failure, harassment, and criticism. The permanent womb of the grave would protect his fragile ego. If you’d read his story you’d see that was one of the main thematic principles.

There were other themes, too. Parenting and the human condition and love and family. There was something about overcoming one’s past, substance abuse, promiscuity, sex, and death – all of the real juicy stuff that people thrive off of and have gone through at some point or another.

The author told himself that his story was the total package; it was too good, too beautiful, and too pure for the cruel, unforgiving hands of the people of today. And so, he slept on top of his dumpster desk with a little pillow and tattered blanket to be close to his story at all times. The original stayed locked in the bottom right drawer waiting for praise, for new eyes, waiting to be found again. It sure was something.

150

CHAPTER XVII

AFTER KURT

Before I tried to blow my brains out, like Kurt Cobain, I left a letter behind in one of my journals that was word for word what he’d written when he’d succeeded. The part that really spoke to me was: The fact is, I can’t fool any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun. I made sure to underline that a few times so my mom and stepdad, Marc, would really get it for once, that these might as well have been my words, too.

But it didn’t matter. The note got ruined from all the blood when I ran around with my jaw hanging off. What was left of my right cheek slapped against my collarbone as I tried to put myself back together.

The note started with: Speaking from the tongue of an experienced simpleton who obviously would rather be an emasculated infantile complain-ee. This note should be pretty easy to understand. That’s genius. That’s me. That’s what Kurt was so good at— thinking of stuff I couldn’t and saying it when I wouldn’t.

My older brother showed me Nirvana with the song “Paper Cuts.” It was before

Nevermind and everybody discovered them. That grinding guitar and guttural scream

151 sounded like Kurt was ripping out his soul for me. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who gets what he was trying to say—that there’s no point in anything. So why bother? If

Kurt Cobain can’t survive in this world, what chance do I have? Do you have? Does anyone have? I didn’t get it until he died.

Doctors said if my mom had come down just ten seconds later, I would have bled out. Lucky me. We were oh-so-lucky she was washing Marc’s bowling shirts upstairs and heard the noise of the hunting rifle he kept on the mantle. Someone must’ve been looking out for me, the neighbors told us, that we just happened to live right down the street from a hospital. It was a blessing in disguise, local pastors added, that I was too much of a stoned screw-up to even kill myself right. Thank God, relatives phoned in to say, that all the bullet did was sever my vocal cords and force the surgeons to reconstruct my face like it was made out of Silly Putty.

I’m so lucky to be alive. Everyone tells me so. But I’d rather be dead.

If I had moved the muzzle over two centimeters I would’ve hit something more vital. It’s something to keep in mind for next time—but I didn’t know anything could be more vital than your face. Just a little while ago I celebrated my seventeenth birthday half-asleep and handcuffed, bedridden in bandages with a catheter in my cock. When I woke up again, they told me they’d found all of my journals, and had gone through each and every page. The police did too, and they weren’t happy with what they found, especially the “concerning lists” I’d made. Kurt Cobain kept journals his whole life.

Every thought I’d ever had, every drawing I ever did, every single thing I ever knew was in my journals, which is why I’m in here.

152

This place is much worse than the actual hospital. Before, I could just lie there and pretend I was dead. Tubes and surgeries and morphine. Here, they want me to live.

Counseling and medications and memories. But they don’t seem to get that I don’t belong in here either. It’s better to burn out than fade away. That was in the note, too.

***

Dr. Thomas’s official title is probably something lame, like Specialist of

Obsessive Celebrity Disorders. He runs the study out of the southern wing of the facility, and was doing it long before I ever got here. I hate him, but when he told me this morning at breakfast that I have a surprise coming, it actually made me kind of excited. I know it means he’s finally going to let me out. The perfect surprise.

And when he does, I’m going to kill myself again.

They still make me sit around the circle like any other day and listen to the guys in group therapy, even though I can’t talk. They thought all this would help. It hasn’t. It won’t. I’ve already seen how hollow things are. I made sure they knew this, especially after they took away my cassettes, because it makes me sick to think about my copy of

Bleach gathering dust in Dr. Thomas’s desk. When I get my tapes back, the first song I’m going to listen to is “Something In The Way” off MTV Unplugged in New York.

The wide-ruled spiral notebook they gave me to write in—and that I know they check when they put me back in my room, even though they think I don’t know—I fill with little sketches of Dr. Thomas screwing different animals. Pigs. Cows. Pandas. T-

Rexes. It helps keep me busy. I hope Dr. Thomas puts everything I draw in the book he’s writing on us.

“Terry, why don’t you start us off today?” Dr. Thomas says.

153

Terry’s this big, 250-pound, former college scholarship linebacker, bodybuilder, professional wrestling fanatic—the type of guy the jocks from my school would’ve had a wet dream over if they saw him in the gym. He’s practically a cartoon caveman with a crew cut above his sloping brow, a square jawline above his undefined neck, and cannon- sized arms with pin thin legs.

I don’t think they even make a size in our standard-issue white cotton sweatpants and T-shirt uniforms to fit Terry’s barrel chest. Mine are itchy and loose and slightly stained brown from where my face drips. Terry requested his sleeves be cut off at the shoulder so his biceps could breathe, and for some reason they did it.

“Well I just wanted to say, Dr. Tom, that I feel like I’m getting a lot better. And I was just thinking that I think it’s time, if you think, that you let me have my wrestling magazines again so I can see what’s happening.” He stares at his thick, bright horizontal lines of scarring on the insides of his wrists— – the only spots on his body where the veins don’t break out. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think that would be a very good idea.” Dr. Thomas picks lint off his stupid pink sweater vest.

“But I could handle it better now. It’s really because of all the good lessons and stuff you’ve been teaching me. It doesn’t bother me at all. I know it’s fake now.” Terry gives a gap-toothed grin, but Dr. Thomas isn’t convinced. When Kurt Cobain was in junior high, his dad signed him up for the school’s wrestling team, but when he had to compete in tournaments he’d just sit on the mat with his arms folded. I’d love to see what

Terry would’ve done then.

154

Terry tried to kill himself because Hulk Hogan became a bad guy. During one of his many breakdowns when snot flew from his nose and he was huffing like he’d run a marathon, Terry whined about how all of his life he’d trained, said his prayers, and took his vitamins just like the Hulkster had instructed. Now he didn’t know what to believe in anymore. Hulkamania had run wild and left him with the most pathetic identity crisis imaginable. If only every high school bully could have something like this happen. The

Trevor Davicks, Wes Dwyers, Mitch Pellons, and Niko Bartells of the world.

“You-don’t-under-stand,” Terry had gasped out a month earlier, during a group therapy session he’d hijacked. “When Macho Man Randy Savage was lying in the ring at

Bash at the Beach, and he needed help . . .” Terry sniffed, slurped that back, then started slapping his own ears with his palms. “Hulk Hogan was his best friend. His best friend.

And then he just . . . leg dropped him like he was nothing. How could he do that to

Macho Man?”

Terry lost television privileges last Monday when he tried to switch the station to watch wrestling. We’re only allowed PBS—Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’

Neighborhood, and The Joy of Painting reruns.

“I just think it would help me get better if I saw what was happening to him, so I could understand everything better. Don’t you think? Dr. Tom? It’s just a few magazines.

Pictures. Not even the real thing.” Terry’s heels rise out of his slippers like he’s ready to spring, and one of the white-scrubbed orderlies standing in front of the door moves closer.

“Terry, I think something like that might give you a little setback. That’s all. Let’s talk about this again later. Why don’t you tell the group something about your—”

155

But before Dr. Thomas even knows what’s happening, Terry grabs the pencil from my hand and lunges. It’s kind of a weird coincidence, because when he goes to stab

Dr. Thomas, I happen to be drawing a picture of Dr. Thomas getting impaled with a unicorn penis. Unfortunately, the orderlies snatch Terry before he can do damage and they sit on his head while he cries.

I pick up my pencil from the cold, gray ceramic floor and get back to my drawing.

Nobody pays any attention to Terry, frothing and spitting out the pills they try to make him swallow as they drag him out. This happens. Just the other day, the old black guy who claims he used to jam with Stevie Wonder, Parliament-Funkadelic, and James

Brown had to be taken away because he wouldn’t stop shouting that Elvis was a racist who’d raped his mother. He hasn’t been allowed out of his room since.

When they let me go home, I’m going to get that little bit of weed hidden under my mattress. Marc always threatened to turn my bedroom into a home gym, but that would require Marc to stop drinking and get up off the couch, so I’m not too concerned.

First thing I’ll do when I get back is smoke, then put on In Utero, then kill myself.

“Why don’t you share with us today, Cameron?” Dr. Thomas nods at the two new strong orderlies who have stepped in.

“Like what?” Cameron asks.

“How about you start with something small? How’re you feeling today?”

“How do I feel? I feel angry. I feel upset. I feel frustrated at the crippling amount of stupidity and neglect you people have for my safety, for your safety, for the safety of the entire world. That’s how I feel. I don’t want to talk anymore unless you let me say what I want to say.”

156

“Go ahead, Cameron. The floor is yours.” I see Dr. Thomas look over to make sure the camera is still filming everything behind the one-way mirror. It is. It always is.

“In the year 2003, popular action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger will be sworn in as the Governor of California and begin to rise in power and influence. He’ll pass laws that’ll forever change America by amending the Constitution to allow foreign- born citizens to run for president. He will then succeed in his 2016 campaign and take over the Oval Office. Due to escalating tensions in the Middle East, he initiates a preemptive nuclear strike, killing most of the world’s population. Of course, he’s one of the few to survive it all, because he’s actually a cybernetic organism. He then leads his army of machines to destroy the remainder of mankind.”

Dr. Thomas lets out a sigh and rubs his bushy mustache.

“Listen. Just listen to me. I know how this sounds. I know it sounds like The

Terminator. But he did that on purpose. Those movies were made to throw people off the truth. It’s what he wants.”

Cameron’s face is red and he’s trembling, but he knows if he gets overexcited, Dr.

Thomas will just have the orderlies sit on his head like they did to Terry. “I know all this because I’m from the future—one possible future, from your points of view. I was sent back to stop him by a small fringe group of rebels who are trying to prevent this from ever happening. I volunteered because of my background training.”

“You mean your military service? You were a marine, Cameron. Do you remember? You fought in Kuwait.” Dr. Thomas points at his own balding head, but what he’s really pointing at is the metal plate inside Cameron’s skull that they put in after a mortar blew him up.

157

“I am a soldier, but I wasn’t in Kuwait. I was with the One Thirty-Second under

Perry from 2021 to 2027, then I was assigned to Recon-Security the last two years under

Connor.” Cameron’s fingertips graze the little ditches and holes that never closed up right above his eyebrows. I have similar skin, but a lumpier face. Nobody really likes to look at me.

“Last year, that cyborg was in two films that further solidified not only his diversity as an actor, but boosted his popularity amongst the general public. Jingle All

The Way captured hearts by playing up his sensitive side with an emphasis on strong familial themes and a solid working-class mentality. His other film, Eraser, reminded everyone of his strength and power as a manly, take-no-prisoners action hero that always gets the bad guys. These are all things he’ll capitalize on during the election.”

The only one in the room in a straightjacket, Zack, lets his yellow greasy hair drop in front of his face as he cracks up. His glasses slide forward on his nose and he cocks his head back to get them fixed, revealing shiny spots of braces in an otherwise darkened mouth. But it doesn’t deter Cameron.

“He did bodybuilding to perfect his physical form and then ventured into motion pictures to achieve worldwide notoriety and fame. He married into a trusted political family, the Kennedys. Haven’t you ever wondered how he’s never been able to stop talking in that weird accent? Technology can only evolve so far so fast, people. His rising superstardom will grow into the nightmare of tomorrow.”

I overheard an orderly talking once and they said the reason Cameron was admitted was because he tried to carry out his mission of killing Schwarzenegger by sneaking onto the set of Junior with a gun. One of Danny DeVito’s security guards saw

158 him and got him arrested. Due to his decorated military background, lawyers were able to swing an insanity plea. His wife still visits every week and brings their infant daughter, but he doesn’t ever look the kid in the eye. It reminds me of my own dad.

Zack mutters something about a robotic governor coming to theaters near you this summer: The Governator. “I’ll be back.” Zack does his best-worst impression of Arnold and goes into hysterics. No one else laughs.

“Thank you for sharing, Cameron.” Dr. Thomas clears his throat and looks into the sunken eyes of Chip, the former-child-star-turned-drug-addict-turned-attempted- murderer of his Hollywood director father. He was all the rage for a few weeks in the tabloids, and is obviously Dr. Thomas’s favorite. Whenever his dad comes to visit, all of the staff get real excited and ask for autographs and I know that pisses Chip off. He wanted to give me a cigarette once to see if I could blow smoke out of the hole in my chin, but I didn’t try, even after he offered me a hundred bucks.

Chip doesn’t look like he wants to talk today, as he avoids Dr. Thomas’ glance and traces an imaginary connect-the-dots line over the track marks of his forearm.

Everyone wants to avoid another one of those self-important rants punctuated with Chip screaming don’t you know who I am?

“Well, Zack.” Dr. Thomas raises his stupid caterpillar eyebrows. He folds his hands on his lap and smiles like he’s practicing for his Barbara Walters interview. “Since you seem so eager to contribute to our discussion today, why don’t you share how you’re feeling?”

Zack rocks back and forth in his seat and twists at his hips with his shoulders arched high, making it look like he’s giving himself the hug he never got as a child. Zack

159 was arrested for stalking Tiffani Amber-Thiessen, star of Saved by the Bell and Beverly

Hills, 90210. Rumor has it he actually broke into her house once and tied her up. They keep him in a straightjacket because if his hands are free he strips naked and touches himself. At night he moans her name.

“Today, I don’t know what it was that made me think of this one time, but I remembered that there was this one time, this time after the first restraining order, when I was following her in a store trying on dresses, and I saw her adjust her bra strap after she came out of the dressing room and that just . . .” Zack extends his slippered feet all the way out in front of him, and tries to rip his arms free.

Dr. Thomas is probably thinking that this is where the money is. This is why he takes notes and tapes us, so one day Oprah will have him on her show to cry over us poor troubled individuals with severe psychological disorders stemming from a nation where our culture is poisoned by the media. This is the crap Dr. Thomas dreams about spewing during the eventual press tours so everyone thinks he’s so smart, and that his job is so thankless.

One time, during a private counseling session, he told me he understood where I was coming from with Kurt Cobain’s death. He said he’d felt similar despair when John

Lennon was assassinated because of how much Lennon meant to him. But it’s not the same. Not even close.

Somebody killed John Lennon. Kurt Cobain killed himself. What does that mean?

What does that say about the rest of the world, that the guy who had it all and was the voice of our Generation X, the guy who was supposed to lead all of us disenfranchised, depressed youth to salvation, took the first ticket out he could find? He must’ve known

160 things would never get better, that they’d only get worse. Kurt’s message was that we should kill ourselves. It was all over his music, deep in each and every song. He was talking directly to me, telling me to do it, to wake up and join him. Did John Lennon ever do that?

That day, I drew a picture of Dr. Thomas blowing John Lennon. Yoko Ono watched.

After Zack doesn’t stop cackling like an asthmatic hyena for a solid minute, Dr.

Thomas ends his stupid group therapy and lets us leave. Which is fine by me. Every second brings me closer to my surprise, where my mom can pick me up and I can go home. I think what I’ll actually do is lock myself up in my bedroom and listen to every single Nirvana song before I kill myself. A final sendoff. They probably won’t leave

Marc’s hunting rifle out on the mantle again, so I’ll have to get creative. Can a headphone cable hold my weight? Probably not, but that would be so perfect.

***

After a lukewarm liquid lunch blended just for me, we have art therapy. It’s my favorite part of the day. I keep waiting for Dr. Thomas to give me my surprise. To tell me

I’m free. To have me sign a stack of papers that’ll throw away any privacy and confidentiality of my time spent here. I can hardly wait to give him the finger when I see this whole place fade into the distance.

With all of the money the hospital has in every other department, you can tell the funding for Dr. Thomas’s little project got the shaft. Since we don’t have much space in this side of the building, we stay cramped in the mess hall and wait for them to hand out supplies at the foldout tables. Orderlies pass out sheets of multicolored construction paper

161 and boxes of broken and missing crayons like we’re in kindergarten. I never use any of it;

I just stick with my pencil and notebook.

I’m pretty good at drawing Kurt from memory. I always used to draw him during class at school, too. The journals they found in my room were filled with sketches. But in here, if there’s one silver lining to take away from all this wasted time, I’ve really perfected my skills. I can draw Kurt’s portrait doing just about anything.

Today, for my last day, I’m wondering what things would’ve been like if Kurt didn’t kill himself. What would he look like in twenty years? So, I start to draw it. And it’s kind of weird, adding wrinkles that weren’t there to his face and some gray to his hair. Imagining what could’ve been. I even try to draw Courtney Love and Frances, his daughter.

“Is that your family?” Zack asks as he walks around the room. I scoot my chair away and keep going.

Where would they all be with Kurt alive? What will his daughter grow up to be with Kurt in the picture? I think they’d be in front of a big house or something, not a mansion; I don’t think Kurt would be into that sort of thing. He’d do something reasonable. Grounded. Normal.

“Don’t you usually draw Kurt Cobain?” Zack’s too-loud nasally voice comes in over my shoulder again. I thought he’d gone across the room to bother Cameron, but he’s actually listening this time when they said to leave him alone.

I hunch over and write on a blank page of the notebook that this is Kurt Cobain, and Courtney, and Frances. But Zack just scrunches up his nose and shakes his head.

“No, that doesn’t look anything like him.” And with that he walks away.

162

Normally I don’t care what any of the freaks here think about me or what I do, and maybe it’s because I’m finally leaving today, but something about Zack’s words stick with me. Every second I stare at my drawing the more I think he’s right. Something is definitely off. I can’t put my finger on it. I did the usual shading and cross-hatching, like

I’d learned to do in art class. My teachers always said drawing was the one thing I was good at, probably because it was the only thing I ever tried in.

Courtney looks good, and I’m taking a total guess with Frances since she’s just a baby, but something about Kurt isn’t right. His chin? His eyes? His nose? The lines on his face don’t even look that out of place. He would’ve looked good as an older guy.

Across the room, Chip works with an intense, vacant focus on the yellow paper he covered with a blue and purple spiral by holding the two colors together. Cameron is at the same table, whispering and nodding with vigor. He’s making a map, tracing a route.

An orderly tries to stop Zack from eating a gold crayon he’s chewing. I still can’t figure out what’s wrong with this picture and it’s driving me crazy and I want to grab my notebook and rip it to shreds and crumble the bits in my hands and start it over from scratch but there isn’t much time left in art and I have to figure out what’s wrong so I don’t make the same mistake again but I can’t.

I think about what Zack said first, asking me if this was my family, and that’s when it hits me that I didn’t draw something that looks like Kurt, I drew something that looks like me. Or what I used to look like. This is what I’d look like if I didn’t kill myself. And this could’ve been my future wife and daughter. This is what we’d all look like together. If Kurt didn’t kill himself maybe I wouldn’t have tried. Maybe things would’ve been different.

163

The thing that doesn’t make this Kurt is the smile. I can see that now. It’s wrong because he never smiled. Every photo I’ve ever seen of him has been with an uninterested grimace and spaced-out stare. Out of all of the drawings I’ve ever done, this is the only one I rip out and tear up when we’re finished. I don’t want Dr. Thomas to see this. I don’t want anyone to see it.

***

In the same room as art therapy, they hand out the multicolored medications— vitamins, they tell us—and we’re allowed to sit at the tables playing cards and listening to classical music.

I think a lot about how I’m going to die. I always have. When Kurt was a kid, he loved to mess around with a Super 8 video camera and do home movies. One of them showed him pretending to commit suicide. I look at the dull tip of my pencil and dream about how much force it’d take to really stab myself with it, somewhere like the heart.

A nurse puts down a cup of electric blue liquid next to me. I can’t take pills or chew solids anymore; everything needs to be a soup or paste. I shake my head and hold up my hand, but it doesn’t work, she doesn’t get that I’m leaving, so I drink it anyway. It won’t matter, and I guess it’s the last time I have to do it before my surprise and I go home. It still hurts to swallow.

Zack runs up to a heavyset nurse wearing rubber gloves who puts his pills right into his mouth. He licks her fingers as she takes them away, then sits at one of the tables on the other side of the room and tries to grind against one of the legs.

Chip takes his cup full of goodies over to one of the barred windows. He looks out, not at the busy street, but directly into the sun. He doesn’t blink. The nurse makes

164 sure he’s taken them all, and he tells her he’s never skipped out on taking a pill a day in his life. She makes him stick out his tongue just to be sure. He’s not lying.

When I listened to Chip, that time he tried to give me a cigarette, he told me he didn’t see what the big deal was about his dad. He ran his fingers through his hair and I thought about how on the show he used to be on as a kid, his hair was really big—tall on top. That was his thing. Now it’s shorter, thinner, but I guess it was a long time ago.

Chip talked for hours about how his dad forced him into show business, wanted him to grow up and be a big star like him, and win awards. I remember his show had a crossover episode with The Monkees. My mom let me stay up to watch the rerun one night after Marc held me down and put his cigarette out on my forehead. It was after my brother had left the house for good, so he wasn’t there to protect me.

I like to sit at my own table. I don’t like other people to talk to me. After the medication, most just shuffle around and mutter to themselves or to everybody all at once.

“Soldier,” Cameron says, standing over me with stiff posture, hands linked behind his back. “I know you’re not like the others. You’re like me.” But I’m not like him. I’m not like anybody else in here. That’s why I’m going home. My surprise is probably the worst kept secret in here by now; I’m sure everyone knows.

He sits down. “That’s why I’m coming to you to let you know of my plan. We both don’t belong in here with these crazies, right? We can trick Dr. Thomas, we can fool all of them and we can get out of here and complete the mission.”

165

But his mission is different from mine. Cameron wants to put a bullet in Arnold’s brain, and I only want to put one in my own. The only thing we have in common is that we’d do anything to get it done.

I have this thing happen to me where if somebody says a word, or I hear a phrase that was in a Nirvana song, it triggers my brain like an acid flashback. “We just have to pretend,” I can hear Cameron whisper, but Kurt’s voice echoes loud and clear like my headphones are on: I’m not like them, but I can pretend.

“We’ve been here long enough. We know what they want to hear. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. Just don’t be like Terry and drop the act. I went to him first, but he’s never getting out. No self-control.”

I don’t look up from my drawing of Dr. Thomas getting anally probed by

Martians. A nurse taps Cameron on his shoulder and makes him back up. I add a little speech bubble to Dr. Thomas’s stupid mouth, saying: “I love ABBA!” He probably does.

Cameron waits until the nurse walks away before he speaks. “Hey, that’s pretty good, actually. Is that supposed to be Dr. Thomas?” He laughs and refocuses. “I’m going to escape when they least expect it. Do you know how?” I don’t stop drawing or listening. “My intel”—his wife who can only get him to talk to her if she feeds him information about Schwarzenegger—“told me that you-know-who is filming a new movie right now. Batman & Robin. He’s playing a villain: Mr. Freeze. Bold choice for him at this stage of his career; he must be getting overconfident in his public perception if he’s willing to paint himself in a negative way. Shows range and vulnerability. Not good.

Not good at all.”

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The nurse comes back and Cameron covers his lips. “I’ll sneak to your room and say the secret phrase: come with me if you want to live. That’s how you’ll know it’s me.”

The speaker in the corner of the ceiling lets out a static squawk paging someone on another floor. “The machines are listening,” Cameron says, bolting across the room to a table with a deck of cards. In an attempt to not seem suspicious, he picks up twelve at random and holds them over his face like a mask. His eyes peek over the top, locked on me.

I write a message for him on a new sheet of paper, outlining my words so he can see it perfectly clear from far away: I’m getting out today. His shoulders droop in defeat.

I hate being locked up with these psychos, but I hate being out in the world with all the other ones even more. I can’t wait to get my surprise, so I can go home and meet Kurt.

***

Just as everybody starts to get quiet and sleepy, they move us to our beds. The vitamins are kicking in. When Kurt was a kid they made him get on a Ritalin prescription because of his inability to pay attention in school. A nurse tells me Dr. Thomas wants to speak with me. It’s about my surprise. This is it. I’m finally getting out. I’m finally going home. I’m finally going to be dead. Finally.

I wonder if my mom’s here yet. She’s never come to this hospital. She used to come to the other one, especially right after she brought me in, but Marc doesn’t let her see me. She said she doesn’t like the way I am now. It upsets her.

I thought my brother would get word of what happened and visit, but he’s probably just really busy in Seattle trying to hit it big. Trying to be the next Kurt Cobain.

I have him to thank for showing me Nirvana, for changing everything, for showing me a

167 way out. My Walkman and all of my cassette tapes are actually his. I wonder if he’ll take them back when I’m dead.

Dr. Thomas has that stupid smile on his face, the one that makes me want to just flip everything off his cluttered desk. All of the papers and folders and files and plants and Beanie Babies and everything else he thinks make up his stupid, hollow, plastic life.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

I get the urge to take my whole notebook and shove it down his throat until the orderlies have to come into the tiny office and shoot me. But instead, I write down: good.

“And you’re not having any pain?” He motions with a hairy knuckle to his cheek, his jaw, his throat, all of the places I don’t really have anymore. “What with the . . . ?”

I shake my head. Inside, I’m imagining how I’d pick up his mug of coffee and smash it over his face. Slit my wrists with the steaming shards that say World’s Best

Therapist and slice my jugular for good measure. Put that in your book. I could probably move fast enough to find my cassettes in the drawers before I bleed out. I’m guessing I could listen to two songs before the orderlies break in through the barricaded, locked door. But which songs do I pick?

“Good.” He rearranges some papers, glancing down at a cardboard box sitting on his lap. “So you’ve been here for a long time, and I think with our one-on-one consultations we’ve been making some real progress.” I look around to see if my mom’s hiding in a corner or something, but they probably don’t let people come back this far into the building. “That’s why I called you in: to discuss your future here. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

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I don’t have a future here. I start to write this down, but then remember what

Cameron said. I don’t want anyone to think I’m being overdramatic and ruin my chances of getting out. The mission. So I scratch that out and jot down instead: Where’s my mom?

“Your mother?” He looks out the window for a second, turns back to face me.

Over his shoulder on the street I don’t see her purple-brown Dodge Caravan with the wood paneling siding splitting it in two. It’s the one I stained the inside of when I was a kid and threw up in the back of after eating McDonald’s. It’s the one that I stained the inside of when she picked me up and threw me in the back to take me to the hospital with my face hanging off. “I imagine she’s at home, or uh, we could always contact her to make arrangements for her to visit you? I didn’t know you wanted to see her. That’s good, though.”

My brother must be the one coming to get me. He probably wants his Nirvana tapes back. I can stay with him in Seattle, far away. I write his name in the notebook.

“You want us to contact your brother, too?”

Oh God, it must be Marc.

“Marc, your stepfather? I can fill out the forms today to have your family come and visit. I’ll get right on it.”

My surprise. Today is the day I’m supposed to leave. I’m supposed to get my tapes back and listen to every song. I’m supposed to go home and kill myself. I’m supposed to meet Kurt.

Dr. Thomas looks at the box he’s hiding under the desk. “Well, I was thinking things could be easier for everybody around here, for you especially, if we got you something . . .” he fumbles with opening it and packaging peanuts spill out under the

169 desk. I’m still waiting for my brother to jump out and reveal the joke is over. My surprise. Nothing makes any sense. Surprise. It never has.

“This”—with the gusto of a game show host he pulls out what looks like a microphone—“is an electrolarynx, or a mechanical larynx. It’s like a digital voice box; you just hold it up to your uh, your chin, I guess, and you move your uh”—he demonstrates—“your mouth to make words and it speaks them for you.” That stupid smile comes back at hearing the voice. My new voice. My surprise.

“Cool, huh? Top of the line. I thought you’d enjoy being able to talk again. This way you can communicate with some of the other patients, make friends, contribute to our group sessions, and not have to write everything down in that notebook all the time.”

I write in my notebook: I’m better. I can go home now. The bad thoughts have stopped. I don’t need that thing. I don’t have anything to say.

He gets up from his chair and puts the thing under the little ledge of my jaw that’s left and he tells me to move my mouth. He says he’s not sure if it’ll work, but it’s worth a try. It hurts to open my mouth, but I feel like I have to so I can scream. The voice box makes a clunky, unnatural stretch of noise while I cry.

“I’m just trying to help you,” Dr. Thomas says.

Before they drag me back to my room, Dr. Thomas confiscates my notebook and pencil. “You don’t need this anymore. And after today’s incident with Terry, this is really for the safety of everyone.”

I let my mouth flap like a fish gasping on land and ask for my cassettes back. It’s the first sentence I’ve said in I don’t know how long. My voice is that of a throat cancer

170 survivor, of an alien invader, of Dr. Thomas and his stupid smile. It makes me feel like my skin is being stripped off.

“Oh, I don’t think that would be a good idea. Something like that might give you a little setback. Let’s talk about that later.”

It’s almost exactly what he said to Terry when he asked for his wrestling magazines earlier in the day. But I’m not like him. I should be going home. Someone like

Terry is never getting out.

***

“I think Terry has something he’d like to say.” Dr. Thomas folds his arms over his stupid purple sweater vest.

Terry shifts in his seat and the shackles around his ankles that are connected to the handcuffs over his massive scarred wrists clink. “I’m sorry for my actions yesterday. It was wrong to try and attack Dr. Thomas. I’m sorry I interrupted everything and acted selfish. I realize now that a lot of what I do is selfish and I’m going to try and work on that in the future.” He looks in my general direction. “And I’m sorry I took your pencil.”

“Thank you.” Dr. Thomas nods. “Now I’m sure some of you have noticed that someone here is looking a little different, and I think it would be very special for us if he shared for the first time today.” Everyone looks at me. But they don’t look at me; they look at the microphone-shaped device in my palm and avert their eyes when I bring it up to my throat. Zack shudders.

It takes me a long time to think of something to say, but no one will talk again until I do. I remember what Cameron said about getting out. Fooling them. Telling them what they want to hear. Then we can escape and complete our missions. I try to wink at

171 him, but since I only have one eye, it doesn’t work. He doesn’t notice. He cowers in fear.

I guess in his mind I’ve become assimilated with the machines, a lost ally.

“I have it good, very good, and I’m grateful, but since the age of seven, I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general. Only because it seems so easy for people to get along and have empathy. Only because I love and feel sorry for people too much, I guess.” Everyone is looking at me now. Really looking at me.

“I must be one of those narcissists who only appreciates things when they’re gone. I’m too sensitive,” my robotic voice drones. “I need to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthusiasms I once had as a child.”

Everyone is quiet. They watch like they want more, but I lower the electrolarynx and start crying pus tears. Dr. Thomas seems impressed, like this is a breakthrough. He smiles his stupid smile.

That was all just another part from Kurt’s suicide note.

From my suicide note.

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