Eat Your Heart Out (15 page)

“Joe attended teachers' college at the University of Syracuse, New York. Upon his graduation in 1964, he returned home to Delaware for what he thought would be a drunk and debauched two weeks before heading to Europe to ‘find himself.' Little did he know that on his first Saturday night back he would see Meryl Vernon, the love of his life, across a dirty, smoky bar.

“Knowing immediately that she was out of his league, Joe cancelled his trip and stayed in Delaware, convinced he could trick Meryl into loving him. Somehow, he did, and a few months later, they moved to Baltimore, where he was offered a job as a history teacher. They married three years later. He remained in Baltimore for the rest of his life, and became, against his will, an avid fan of the Orioles.

“He thoroughly enjoyed his work as a teacher. He believed the kids kept him young, and no one could argue with summers off. For eighteen years he coached more than half the sports teams, and in eighteen years his baseball team, the Catonsville Bears, won ten championships. In retrospect, he realized he got lazy somewhere there in the 1980s. Upon his retirement, he continued to watch the Bears play, hollering encouraging hints from the sidelines, from ‘My grandma can run faster than you!' to ‘Don't worry, that ball didn't want to be caught anyway!' Five percent of his pension will be donated to the Catonsville Bears and their upkeep, so that the kids will always remember Mr. Johnson's advice, even from beyond the grave.

“Joe is survived by the far most significant and important part of his life, his wife, Meryl. She was the best thing that ever happened to him, and he went to sleep every night feeling lucky to have known her. She made him laugh, mostly at himself. She was smarter than he was, but like any good wife, sometimes she let him believe otherwise. She aged well too.

“But above all, she loved him even when he didn't deserve it. And he loved her as much on the day he died as the first moment he saw her.

“His only regret upon his passing is that they didn't get more time together.

“He thanks everyone for coming, and reminds Meryl that he is not lost. He is only waiting to be found.”

It is nighttime
and Meryl lies on the grass in her front yard. She can't sleep. Darkness came hours ago. She tries to count every star in the sky.

She wakes up to the newspaper boy gently shaking her, a stricken look on his face. She is still dressed in black.

“Do you want me to walk you into your house, ma'am? Do you live here?”

“I live here. I'm all right. I couldn't sleep.”

“Are you sick?”

She shook her head. She straightened her dress. He helped her stand.

Meryl turns to her house. Why is it still standing?

“Is this your house?”

Meryl put her fingertips on his lips. Why did everyone act as if they were the same person as yesterday?

His fist collides with face,
his knuckles cutting through his opponent's soft cheeks, knifing deeper and deeper through his flesh, against his pointed teeth. He feels the boy's jaw separate and move farther to the side than it should.

The boy doesn't make a sound.

He feels a hit right under his chin, forcing his bottom teeth against the roof of his mouth. He spits blood.

He kicks the boy square in the guts. He feels his foot stopped against sinewy stomach. The kick lands more softly than he had hoped. He draws his foot backward again, kicking the boy again.

The boy falls to the ground, scraping his body against the pavement, the kick leaving a lasting impression. He's winded, howling for air.

Michael reaches down and gives him a hand.

“Thanks, Mike.” He spits.

“You done?”

“Yeah.” Loveday, the boy, nods.

Mike helps him off the ground.

“You bleeding?” he asks.

“Nah, not really. You?”

“Just a little,” he says, pointing to his mouth. “Nothing serious.”

Mike and Loveday started their fight club not long after they met. It's only the two of them. Not exclusive, really, but no one else is all that into it.

“Fuck, that was hard,” says Loveday.

“That's what your mom said.”

Loveday laughs and so does Michael, until he realizes that it's not that funny when you're actually fucking the guy's mom.

Holding ice to
his lip, Michael stands in his messy bedroom.

His clothes are always too baggy and he's always overdressed, wearing a suit jacket or tie, sometimes both. He likes it that way, telling Loveday's mom, Lauren, that “it's glamorous to be dressed up with nowhere to go.”

This morning he stands, still with nowhere to go, in front of his mirror for a little longer than usual. The mirror is plastered with pictures of Bob Dylan, guitars, and ghetto superstars.

Michael is tall and skinny and good-looking, even if he doesn't think so. He has a thoughtful face, the type that becomes more handsome with age.

“You will look good weathered,” she told him after she swept her fingertips across his face, before she kissed him for the first time. His face is young, which Michael hates, but that's what she's fallen in love with. The youngness brings her closer to what she could have had.

His cheeks and chin are sprinkled with the hopeful stubble that only sixteen-year-old boys grow. All together, his features portray an acute sensitivity. Michael was the little boy that other boys picked on because he looked soft, and so, he also hates his sensitivity. But the sensitivity is remarkable and apparent, and no matter how he tries to mask it, it remains.

“You have no idea how arresting you are,” she said last night after they made love.

“My Bob Dylan,” she calls him.

He angles his face and juts his jaw out toward the mirror. His face looks thinnest that way. He takes off his shirt and throws it on the floor with the other mess. He looks back up to the mirror.

He sees the angles of his body. His concave chest. His protruding lower stomach. It's the only souvenir he has left to remind him he used to be the fat kid that everyone hated. He stares at the extra flesh. He grabs all of it.

“Fuck.”

He sucks in his gut and turns to the side. He decides he looks better from the side. Taller, thinner, a little more like Dylan.

“You have a beautiful body,” she told him last night, her sweaty hands moving along his broad back, before he entered her.

He smiles.

Then Michael is
struck by a thought that is as uplifting as it is crushing. Looking in the mirror this morning was the longest time in his memory when he wasn't thinking about numbers or doing math in his head. It's uplifting because Michael hates thinking about math, even though he sees numbers everywhere he looks. It's crushing because, now that he's noticed, he's thinking about numbers again. The only time he doesn't think about them is when he's fighting, fucking, or high. Consequently, he tries to participate in those three activities as often as humanly possible.

“Mike! Hurry up! You're going to miss your bus.”

“Ma, relax!”

He's thinking about prime numbers now. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19.

Michael has a special relationship with numbers. He doesn't see them, he feels them, as shapes and colours. Seven is blue, rectangular, kind of scary. Three is red, circular, pretty relaxed. Ten is yellow, star-shaped, overwhelming. He likes four the best because it's purple and reminds him of his old friend Caitlin.

He grabs a blue button-up shirt from the floor. He throws it on and decides he likes it. It makes him look sophisticated.

He runs out of his room and then down the stairs, counting every step.

He meets his
mother as he's trying to get out the front door.

“Did you eat breakfast?” she asks.

“No, I'm going to be late.”

“You are going to make yourself sick if you don't start eating more.”

“Sure, Ma.”

He grabs his Dodgers cap and checks his reflection in the glass panel of the front door. He tells himself he looks “fresh” and “ill,” his two favourite adjectives. He throws his ears in and grabs his Ray-Bans. It's too dark for sunglasses, not the season, but he wears them anyway.

“Bye, Ma.”

And he's out the door.

“You're not crazy,
honey. You're autistic. It's different.”

That's what his mom would tell him when he was a kid, and he'd come home crying because he couldn't keep the numbers away, convinced he was a lunatic and that nothing could be done to fix him.

“Bill Gates is autistic,” he told Lauren a few weeks after they started fucking. Meaning, he's not retarded, but that he has some extraordinary abilities that leave him feeling extraordinarily disabled as a result.

“So, what are you?” she asked. “A genius?”

“Yeah. I'm a useless fucking genius.”

He's gifted, but there's still nothing that can be done to fix him.

He gets on the bus.

He feels around in his pocket. He only has a roach and five dollars on him.

“Fuck.”

Now there's no way he can get high until school's out, and that's if he's lucky. Hopefully, someone will smoke him on some between classes because he's broke as a joke right now. He tells himself that he shouldn't have smoked that extra spliff before bed last night, but he just couldn't get to sleep after sneaking home from Lauren.

“I love you,” she'd told him for the first time ever.

He didn't say it back. Should he have?

He nods at the bus driver, a familiar face, as he pays his fare. He looks around the bus. None of his friends are on yet.

“Gay.”

He's disappointed because with no other option, dumb chit-chat distracts him. When he's distracted, the numbers disappear, sometimes for up to a minute.

He turns his iPod up, and a Jay Dee remix comes on. There's a lot of instrumental, which makes counting the beats hard. He bobs his head up and down to the music, trying to shake the numbers out.

But he can't.

He changes the song. It's Dylan's “Up to Me.” He turns it up even louder. He breathes deep and feels a little better.

Today is going to be a long fucking day, he thinks.

When Michael gets
off the bus, he has to walk a block before he gets to school. There are a lot of cars parked up and down the street. He adds up all the numbers on their licence plates. When he feels the final answer, he always feels it in his left arm.

“Go away. Just go away. I don't want you today,” he says, hitting his left arm, hard. It doesn't work, and he hopes none of the other kids walking to school noticed him talking to himself.

Why is it so bad this morning? He was doing way better with numbers, thinking about them less, especially since Lauren. But it's bad today, the worst it's been in a long time.

“Motherfucker.”

He gets to the front doors of the school, looks at his watch.

8:55. Five minutes before class.

Eight plus five is thirteen. Thirteen times eight is one hundred and four. One hundred and four divided by fifty-five is one point eight nine zero nine zero.

He's thankful he has math class first period. At least that gives him a reason to be thinking about all these numbers. Maybe he can relax a bit. He lights a smoke. Halfway through his cigarette, Loveday approaches him. Mike was just thinking about Lauren's wet pussy, but he tries to act normal.

Michael and Loveday have a complicated relationship. When Mike was fat, Loveday was athletic and popular. He ruined Mike's life. Mike sometimes thinks that's why he's fucking his mom—to get him back. But then lately, all these feelings have come up, and he can't be sure that anything is true anymore.

About eighteen months ago, when Mike lost all the weight (thanks, cigarettes), he started smoking weed behind the school where Loveday and all his friends smoked. It was bizarre at first; Michael was constantly plagued by that vulnerable feeling you get when you stick your arm out of a moving car and everything inside you wants you to put it back. But he persevered, mysteriously stoic, and Loveday had matured, slightly. After a few weeks of silent avoidance, they started burning joints together.

They've been friends ever since. Now Mike is considered athletic and popular, which is all he ever wanted for as long as he can remember. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, breathless and confused, lost in all the change, still trying to convince himself that things really are different now. Then he puts his hand on his heart and counts the racing beats until he falls back asleep.

Sometimes, when Mike is too high, when he's at their house for dinner, when they're just chilling, he thinks Loveday can see how he destroyed him. And then sometimes, when Loveday is too high, he remembers everything he's said and done. But they don't get too high very often.

And they never talk about it.