Insurrections (4 page)

You have strange dreams, Walter said, returning to the couch. He let out a sigh as he removed his hat and settled himself into his seat. I'm not sure I want to hear the rest of this. Is this better than an episode of
Good Times?
Because I'm missing
Good Times
and you're missing your son's birthday party.

My brain was all cloudy and black before this, Rashid said, gesturing about with his furry, blue hands. I was all filled with goddamn anxiety, man. This gave me purpose. Now it's turned to shit.

I can smell that.

Are you just going to make jokes?

I'm sorry. It feels like the moment calls for some humor. You're ranting and dressed like Elmo.

The Cookie Monster.

Whatever, Rashid.

I spent every free hour rooting through the Internet, trying to find a deal on a Cookie Monster outfit. Got fat on sugar cookies and chocolate chips and on the creme-filled ones, clicking from site to site, chasing one dead end to another. Sometimes I'd be fucking red-eyed late at night at that computer, then I'd wake and do it all over again. This was all during
my summer break when no one was paying me shit and I had to be home with Luce playing babysitter most days. Luce is running about and screaming and smelling like warm piss and shit and I'm searching, not even noticing my son is stinking until the mess starts growing stale. I figured if Luce doesn't care, why should I? Luce at some point would try to climb onto my lap. And I'd have to say, Kid, you stink. But he'd be crying and screaming and pushing his way up there to sit, like my lap's a throne and he's king, and I'd search until I couldn't take it anymore and then I'd go change him and search some more.

So . . . Luce shitted in your costume? Walter asked.

What? No. No, no. I found this one late, late at night just before school started in August. Did I tell you that I'm broke? I put off getting this costume so many times waiting for some money. Waiting for when I got a little left over, but it's mostly check to check for me, bruh. This one was on some auction site. An out-the-way one most people know nothing about. Bids started at five dollars and went up to fifteen and I bid thirty to get it going. But thirty dollars from where? Ricca had to cover the entire rent that month. If Ricca knew I was bidding on this costume . . . Fuck. You know, I had to shake my parents down for just enough to cover the cable and Internet. Cable's important. I watched
Sesame Street
three, four times a day on the kiddie channels to study Cookie's mannerisms and voice. No use being some generic monster; if you're going to do something, do it right. That's what my father used to say. He's probably upstairs now trying to figure what the hell is wrong with me. Trying to figure out why I'm not doing things the right way like he told me. Fuck, you think he'll recognize that I tried?

Rashid, every father says that bit about doing things right. I said that to my daughter and one day you'll say it to Luce.

Right. Anyway, to lose the Internet would have been tragic. A disruption in the costume search would mean a shitty party for my son. You ever bid in an Internet auction? That shit is a white heat. Checking back every few minutes. It's all about defeating all the other bidders and cheating the auctioneer. There go the bids. Forty dollars. Fifty-five. Higher. Seventy-five, ninety. Something was telling me to stop. I wouldn't have an extra ninety bucks for weeks. A hundred and fifty. All this tension throbbing at my throat, Walter. One fifty-five, one seventy-five. The other dude topped off at two fifty and, Walter, I'm at three fifty and thought
that was it. No one bid for a while. In the last minutes someone bid four seventy-five and I hit back with five fifty. And then someone hit back and I hit back. When it all ended and I realized I'd won, everything was silent all around me and I heard my office chair creaking. And I'm sweating and grinning like a dumbass fool. All very exhilarating, right? Then I got the sudden awareness that I was on the hook for twelve hundred and fifty big ones that I didn't have.

Walter sat on the couch, leaning forward, his head in his hands. Man, Rashid, I seen some reckless things, but damn. If you were married to my daughter—

I'm not that reckless. I thought about the change jars I kept. Sometimes I could get like a hundred and fifty out of there, but they were empty. Then I remembered that Ricca had just dumped all of that into Luce's college fund.

Oh, God, Rashid.

God had nothing to do with any of this. Nothing. He's no help to me. So, yeah, I looted that college fund. Ain't tell Ricca shit about that. It's in my name, therefore it's my money. Went into our shared savings. Shared checking. Cleaned that shit out. I don't know how we're paying rent next month. Then there's our retirement fund. Thing is down to twenty-eight dollars and it's got a thirty-five-dollar maintenance fee every month. You know what I got for my troubles? A used, holey costume that smells like someone pulled it out the rankest dumpster in America. I bit my nails and waited two whole weeks to find out the world is a fucked-up place. Ad said it was brand new. Never worn. Look at me. This look like something that's never been worn? The thing came to the door after the damn party had started. I took that box to the back room quick, quick, quick.

Rashid's words became caught on the cracking of his voice, and tears poured down his cheeks.

Man, Walter, he said. I screamed and Ricca came in and I screamed again and she was like, There are twelve kids out there. I told her I spent a G, much more than a G—I don't want to even tell you how much—on a smelly maggot-covered Cookie Monster corpse. She was pissed, Walter. Ain't even mention the money; that's how I know she's pissed. I'm gonna hear about it later. Gonna have to tell her we have to start all over with Luce's college fund, with everything. She just looked at me with these dead eyes. Wasn't no more love in those things. She said, Rashid,
get a grip. There are twelve kids out there trying to eat cookies and have a good time. Don't be a jerk. We'll deal with everything else later. She stormed out and I thought about it and was like, She's right. So I put on the costume and walked out singing about how C was for Cookie and you know what, all twelve of those kids started crying and the adults started coughing and waving their hands and one little girl grabbed her mother and said, Mommy, the Cookie Monster stinks. That's when I took off the head and ran out and came down here to you.

Walter breathed deeply, taking the garbage smell into his lungs, and then he sat silently with his eyes closed, hoping when he opened them there would be no absurdity, no insanity inside his apartment. Where was Laura when he needed a firm but patient hand? Walter opened his eyes and there was the Cookie Monster with the head of a man and a stench that grated at his throat.

God, Rashid, that's quite something, he said. I'm not sure—You young people. There are going to be rocks in your way and rocks on your backs. You're a man, you can't approach this like a baby would. It won't get any easier, Rashid. Not a lick easier. It's gonna be like this forever. Shit, it's going to get harder.

Forever, huh? I was going to name Luce forever, or rather, Samad, one of the ninety-nine names of Allah—Al-Samad, the eternal. But then I started to think about eternity, what a curse if you're not God, right? My man God doesn't have holy rent and holy bills to pay. Eternity means someone always digging into your pocket, forever being distracted from your deepest desires, spending all your time doing something you don't want to do in order to pay a petty light bill. So in that hospital room while Ricca was screaming and pushing Luce out, I changed my mind about wanting my son to be eternal. His little head looked sort of like a beam of light so I dropped my college Arabic for my high school Spanish. La Luz, the light. But light, it's beautiful and all, but it generates heat: heat burns. That's what this family shit does, it burns you. Sets you on fire. Burns you to a fucking crisp. All my sense is burned from me. Everything. I'm gutted like a burnt-out building. I'm burned. I can't stand. One day I'm gonna topple over, a pile of fucking burnt ash that'll burn forever.

And that, Rashid, is the good news. The sun burns and burns and burns and one day it'll burn out. Massive explosion, taking everything with it, kid. But while it burns, look how much flourishes. Go back to your
family, Rashid. Make the day special for Luce. Let Ricca scream at you. You deserve it. And then tomorrow, continue to burn, it's all you can do.

Rashid stared at the old man and then he turned and slowly walked to the door. Yeah, he said with his hand on the knob. Yeah. You know something, Walter? I regret it all. Every single moment. Not getting head from Kyla. Ricca. Luce. This stinking-ass Cookie Monster costume. My job. Cross River. And if I had made any different choices in life, I'd regret those too. Catch you later, Walter.

Later, son. Oh, you might want to take off that smelly costume before you go back in there.

Right, Rashid said from the hallway. As he shimmied from the furry blue outfit, the door slammed itself shut. Walter heard Rashid's feet moving up the stairs and above him a door opened and slammed.

If there were a time to head to the corner store and get a pack of beer, it would be now, he thought. Why would he want to remember all this? This was the type of memory that one wants to fade into a fuzzy haze. Walter noticed the blue Cookie Monster head resting on the floor. From some angles, the smiling open mouth looked like an expression of abashed joy, from others it resembled horror. He rubbed his eyes and his forehead. He felt drunk, but it was a different drunk from the one the bottle would give him. Walter suddenly was struck by the image of one day coming in to see Rashid's legs dangling atop his balcony, all dead and furry and Cookie Monster blue.

But right now there was music and children's laughter from above and when he got close to the balcony, he could even hear Rashid laughing, to be sure. Walter placed the smiling, googly-eyed Cookie Monster head atop his bookshelf and rested himself on the couch. That afternoon he fell asleep watching the grinning puppet head and listening to the joy from above.

Walking with a hunched posture, shambling through a windy day, being pelted by cool dots of water. There was something inevitable about my bent gait. Somehow, somewhere deep down I really did believe it would protect me from the rain. Did no such thing, of course.

The day was breezy and cold, and I wore a thin jacket as I'd expected it to be warmer when I left the house in the morning. Cold wetness does much to clear the detritus from the mind and leave one focused only on the moment, and before long I had two thoughts: I'm soaked. I'm shivering.

I've never been one to watch weather reports. It's more honorable to take the weather as it comes.

Forgive me if I digress; you wanted to know what happened to my brother.

So it was raining that day, pretty heavily. The sky glowed an incandescent gray, shimmering overhead. I nervously smoked a cheap cigar, my lungs burning. I imagined them a flaming red, shining through my skin and through my clothes. Then I imagined them a crusty, charred black. But really they were likely still a fresh bright pink, like cooked salmon. I only smoke at times of distress.

The Cross River had again breached the Southside, at least part of it, the part that's always taking the brunt of the floodwaters—the part where all the poor folks live and where my little brother lived. First it was dry, and then it started to rain and just like that the water rushed in, a steady flow of dirty brown liquid. I have never understood why people live there. This is nearly a yearly occurrence and nobody seems to care. There's a
trailer park down there that regularly becomes a scattered field of overturned trailer homes, the flimsy material they make those pieces-of-shit with strewn all about the place. I see pictures, almost every year, on the front page of the
Days & Times
. And then they rebuild absurdly like a great flood never happened.

I told my brother not to move into that trailer park, but listening—not drugs—was his true problem. The bastard that owns that place calls it Riverview. What a fucker.

In the morning when they were threatening rain and promising a flood like this town hadn't seen in a hundred years, my mother called me up nearly in tears, telling me to go find Stephen, make him come home.

Mom, I told her, the last time I talked to him he said that trailer park was home. He cussed me out. He's not going to listen now.

Nobody had talked to him in weeks, since he didn't have a phone. Every once in a while he'd call, sounding distant and scratchy, just a disembodied voice offering a mumbled cry. Usually he requested cash, some emergency always on the horizon, and my mother would send me to Western Union with a fat envelope of her Social Security money. He'd pick up the cash across the bridge in Virginia—Port Yooga. It always galled me the lengths he'd go to avoid letting me or Mom see the desperate creature he'd become. Those times, I couldn't help but imagine the phone call I'd receive one day telling me they'd found his gaunt, lifeless body on a dirty floor.

This stormy day when I saw her, she put the money in my hand, clutched my free palm tightly, and stared at me soulfully with those big gray eyes. Go and get your brother, she said, and bring him home.

She tried to appear strong, but I knew she'd been crying for him as she'd never cry for me.

When I left her house it had already started getting chilly, but the rain hadn't begun for the day. I didn't believe it would rain, at least not as hard as it did. I needed to think about what I'd say to Stephen when I saw him, so I decided to walk. It would be a long walk, but it would give Stephen a chance to sober up for the day and me a chance to choose my words carefully.

Ever notice how the weather can turn your whole mood? As I walked, the sky became darker. I watched the churning clouds move. They seemed black with rage and so was I. How could Mom allow herself to be played
over and over by this con man? I pulled a cigar from a package and lit it as I rehearsed my words, and they became more rage-filled and the rain fell harder. I had heard that tobacco can calm the disturbed soul and it only became a problem when modern man began using it as a crutch. At first it tickled the back of my throat, then it felt like pinpricks in my windpipe. Before long my lungs burned, and I started to think about my mission and I hunched over. Rain poured and the high wind blew my jacket about and made me stumble. The rain pellets stung as they sprayed the exposed flesh of my cheeks. My cigar grew soggy, the damp tobacco blotting out the glowing tip. I sheltered beneath a tree, but then the thunder clapped. It was a loud and deep rumbling, accompanied by a bright purple fork of lightning. I tossed the cigar and kept moving.