A Visit From the Goon Squad (22 page)

3.
For those who will inevitably interpret this caprice as further evidence that I am, indeed, a “numb nuts,” a “creepazoid,” or a “sick puppy” (—excerpts from correspondence received from strangers while in jail), I can offer only the following: On a spring day almost four years ago, I noticed a girl with short thick legs and a long narrow torso, wearing a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, picking up dog poop with a Duane Reade bag. She was one of those muscley girls who turn out to have been a swimmer or a diver in high school (though I later learned she’d been neither), and her dog was a mangy, wet-looking little terrier of the sort that would seem, even by the most neutral and objective standards, unlovable. But she loved it. “Here, Whiskers,” she cooed. “Come on, girl.” Watching her, I saw it all: the small, overheated apartment strewn with running shoes and leotards, the biweekly dinners at her parents’, the soft dark fuzz on her upper lip that she bleached each week with a tart-smelling white cream. And the feeling I had was not of wanting her so much as being surrounded by her, blundering inside her life without having moved.
    “May I help you with that?” I asked, stepping into the sunlight where she and Whiskers stood and slipping the Duane Reade bag full of poop from her hand.
    Janet grinned. It was like someone waving a flag. “Are you insane?” she said.

4.
To the Editor:
    In the earnest spirit of your recent editorial (“Vulnerability in Our Public Spaces,” Aug. 9), and as the embodiment, if you will, of the “mentally unstable or otherwise threatening people” you so yearn to eradicate from the public domain in the wake of my “brutal attack” on that “too trusting young star,” allow me to make a suggestion that is sure to appeal to Mayor Giuliani, at the very least: why not simply erect checkpoints at the entrances to Central Park and demand identification from those who wish to enter?
    Then you will be able to call up their records and evaluate the relative success or failure of their lives—marriage or lack thereof, children or lack thereof, professional success or lack thereof, healthy bank account or lack thereof, contact with childhood friends or lack thereof, ability to sleep peacefully at night or lack thereof, fulfillment of sprawling, loopy youthful ambitions or lack thereof, ability to fight off bouts of terror and despair or lack thereof—and using these facts, you can assign each person a ranking based on the likelihood that their “personal failures will occasion jealous explosions directed at those more accomplished.”
    The rest is easy: simply encode each person’s ranking into an electronic bracelet and affix it to their wrist as they enter the park, and then monitor those encoded points of light on a radar screen, with personnel at the ready to intervene, should the perambulations of low-ranking nonfamous people begin to encroach upon the “safety and peace of mind that celebrities deserve, as much as anyone else.”
    I ask only this: that in keeping with our hallowed cultural tradition, you rank infamy equally with fame, so that when my public excoriation is complete—when the
Vanity Fair
reporter I entertained in prison two days ago (following her interviews with my chiropractor and building superintendent) has done her worst, along with the TV “news” magazines; when my trial and sentence are concluded and I’m allowed at last to return to the world, to stand beneath a public tree and touch its scraggly bark—then I, like Kitty, will be afforded some protection.
    Who knows? I might even glimpse her one day as we both promenade in Central Park. I doubt we would actually speak. I’d prefer to stand at a distance next time, and wave.
    Respectfully,
    Jules Jones

Out of Body

Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it. Drew says he’s going straight to law school. After practicing awhile, he’ll run for state senator. Then U.S. senator. Eventually, president. He lays all this out the way you’d say,
After Modern Chinese Painting I’ll go the gym, then work in Bobst until dinner
, if you even made plans anymore, which you don’t—if you were even in school anymore, which you aren’t, although that’s supposedly temporary.

You look at Drew through layers of hash smoke floating in the sun. He’s leaning back on the futon couch, his arm around Sasha. He’s got a big, hey-come-on-in face and a head of dark hair, and he’s built—not with weight-room muscle like yours, but in a basic animal way that must come from all that swimming he does.

“Just don’t try and say you didn’t inhale,” you tell him.

Everyone laughs except Bix, who’s at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were
trying
to be funny, and they’re afraid you’ll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail, even at something so small.

Drew takes a long hit. You hear the smoke creak in his chest. He hands the pipe to Sasha, who passes it to Lizzie without smoking any.

“I promise, Rob,” Drew croaks at you, holding in smoke, “if anyone asks, I’ll tell them the hash I smoked with Robert Freeman Jr. was excellent.”

Was that “Jr.” mocking? The hash is not working out as planned: you’re just as paranoid as with pot. You decide, no, Drew doesn’t mock. Drew is a believer—last fall, he was one of the diehards passing out leaflets in Washington Square and registering students to vote. After he and Sasha got together, you started helping him—mostly with the jocks because you know how to talk to them. Coach Freeman, aka your pop, calls Drew’s type “woodsy.” They’re loners, Pop says—skiers, wood-choppers—not team players. But you know all about teams; you can talk to people on teams (only Sasha knows you picked NYU because it hasn’t had a football team in thirty years). On your best day you registered twelve team-playing Democrats, prompting Drew to exclaim, when you gave him the paperwork, “You’ve got the
touch
, Rob.” But you never registered yourself, that was the thing, and the longer you waited, the more ashamed of this you got. Then it was too late. Even Sasha, who knows all your secrets, has no idea that you never cast a vote for Bill Clinton.

Drew leans over and gives Sasha a wet kiss, and you can tell the hash is getting him horny because you feel it too—it makes your teeth ache in a way that will only let up if you hit someone or get hit. In high school you’d get in fights when you felt like this, but no one will fight with you now—the fact that you hacked open your wrists with a box cutter three months ago and nearly bled to death seems to be a deterrent. It functions like a force field, paralyzing everyone in range with an encouraging smile on their lips. You want to hold up a mirror and ask:
How exactly are those smiles supposed to help me?

“No one smokes hash and becomes president, Drew,” you say. “It’ll never happen.”

“This is my period of youthful experimentation,” he says, with an earnestness that would be laughable in a person who wasn’t from Wisconsin. “Besides,” he says, “who’s going to tell them?”

“I am,” you say.

“I love you too, Rob,” Drew says, laughing.

Who said I loved you?
you almost ask.

Drew lifts Sasha’s hair and twists it into a rope. He kisses the skin under her jaw. You stand up, seething. Bix and Lizzie’s apartment is tiny, like a dollhouse, full of plants and the smell of plants (wet and planty), because Lizzie loves plants. The walls are covered with Bix’s collection of Last Judgment posters—naked babyish humans getting separated into good and bad, the good ones rising into green fields and golden light, the bad ones vanishing into mouths of monsters. The window is wide open, and you climb out onto the fire escape. The March cold crackles your sinuses.

Sasha joins you on the fire escape a second later. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Don’t know,” you say. “Fresh air.” You wonder how long you can go on speaking in two-word sentences. “Nice day.”

Across East Seventh Street, two old ladies have folded bath towels on their windowsills and are resting their elbows on them while they peer down at the street below. “Look there,” you say, pointing. “Two spies.”

“It makes me nervous, Bobby,” Sasha says. “You out here.” She’s the only one who gets to call you that; you were “Bobby” until you were ten, but according to your pop it’s a girl’s name after that.

“How come?” you say. “Third floor. Broken arm. Or leg. Worst case.”

“Please come in.”

“Relax, Sash.” You park yourself on the grille steps leading up to the fourth-floor windows.

“Party migrate out here?” Drew origamis himself through the living room window onto the fire escape and leans over the railing to look down at the street. From inside, you hear Lizzie answer the phone—“Hi, Mom!”—trying to fluff the hash out of her voice. Her parents are visiting from Texas, which means that Bix, who’s black, is spending his nights in the electrical engineering lab where he’s doing his Ph.D. research. Lizzie’s parents aren’t even staying with her—they’re at a hotel! But if Lizzie is sleeping with a black man in the same city where her parents are, they will just
know
.

Lizzie pokes her torso out the window. She’s wearing a tiny blue skirt and tan patent-leather boots that go up higher than her knees. To herself, she’s already a costume designer.

“How’s the bigot?” you ask, realizing with chagrin that the sentence has three words.

Lizzie turns to you, flushed. “Are you referring to my mother?”

“Not me.”

“You can’t talk that way in my apartment, Rob,” she says, using the Calm Voice they’ve all been using since you got back from Florida, a voice that leaves you no choice but to test how hard you have to push before it cracks.

“I’m not.” You indicate the fire escape.

“Or on my fire escape.”

“Not yours,” you correct her. “Bix’s, too. Actually, no. The city’s.”

“Fuck you, Rob,” Lizzie says.

“You too,” you say, grinning with satisfaction at the sight of real anger on a human face. It’s been a while.

“Calm down,” Sasha tells Lizzie.

“Excuse me? I should calm down?” Lizzie says. “He’s being a total asshole. Ever since he got back.”

“It’s only been two weeks,” Sasha says.

“I love how they talk about me like I’m not here,” you observe to Drew. “Do they think I’m dead?”

“They think you’re stoned.”

“They’re correct.”

“Me too.” Drew climbs the fire escape until he’s a few stairs above you and perches there. He takes a long breath, savoring it, and you take one too. In Wisconsin, Drew has shot an elk with a bow and arrow, skinned it, cut off the meat into sections, and carried it home in a backpack, wearing snowshoes. Or maybe he was kidding. He and his brothers built a log cabin with their bare hands. He grew up next to a lake, and every morning, even in winter, Drew swam there. Now he swims in the NYU pool, but the chlorine hurts his eyes and it’s not the same, he says, with a ceiling over you. Still, he swims there a lot, especially when he’s bummed or tense or in a fight with Sasha. “You must’ve grown up swimming,” he said when he first heard you were from Florida, and you said, Of course. But the truth is you’ve never liked the water—something only Sasha knows about you.

You lurch from the steps to the other end of the fire escape platform, where a window looks into the little alcove where Bix’s computer lives. Bix is in front of it, dreadlocks thick as cigars, typing messages to other graduate students that they’ll read on their computers, and reading messages they send back. According to Bix, this computer-message-sending is going to be
huge
—way beyond the telephone. He’s big on predicting the future, and you haven’t really challenged him—maybe because he’s older, maybe because he’s black.

Bix jumps at the sight of you looming outside his window in your baggy jeans and football jersey, which you’ve taken to wearing again, for some reason. “Shit, Rob,” he says, “What are you doing out there?”

“Watching you.”

“You’ve got Lizzie all stressed-out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So come in here and tell her that.”

You climb in through Bix’s window. There’s a Last Judgment poster hanging right over his desk, from the Albi Cathedral. You remember it from your Intro to Art History class last year, a class you loved so much you added art history to your business major. You wonder if Bix is religious.

In the living room Sasha and Lizzie are sitting on the futon couch, looking grim. Drew is still out on the fire escape.

“I’m sorry,” you tell Lizzie.

“It’s okay,” she says, and you know you should leave it there—it’s fine, leave it alone, but some crazy engine inside you won’t let you stop: “I’m sorry your mom is a bigot. I’m sorry Bix has to have a girlfriend from Texas. I’m sorry I’m an asshole. I’m sorry I make you nervous because I tried to kill myself. I’m sorry to get in the way of your nice afternoon.…” Your throat tightens up and your eyes get wet as you watch their faces go from stony to sad, and it’s all kind of moving and sweet except that you’re not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, they’ll forgive you, they won’t desert you, and the question is, which one is really “you,” the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?

You leave Bix and Lizzie’s with Sasha and Drew and head west, toward Washington Square. The cold spasms in the scars on your wrists. Sasha and Drew are a braid of elbows and shoulders and pockets, which presumably keeps them warmer than you. When you were back in Tampa, recovering, they took a Greyhound to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and stayed up all night and watched the sun rise over the Mall, at which point (they both say) they felt the world start to change right under their feet. You snickered when Sasha told you this, but ever since, you find yourself watching strangers’ faces on the street and wondering if they feel it, too: a change having to do with Bill Clinton or something even bigger that’s everywhere—in the air, underground—obvious to everyone but you.

At Washington Square you and Sasha say good-bye to Drew, who peels off to take a swim and wash the hash from his head. Sasha’s wearing her backpack, heading for the library.