Knockout (17 page)

W
e're all hustled inside. Sitting at the dining room table are two other women. Schleiss and I find out that Reichmann's wife actually does have sisters, nice friendly ones. The dark-haired one is named Elyse and the blonde one is Cara.

Slowly the night turns into a party, not like the drunken keggers we used to have when we were young, but a decent party just the same. At some point Cara pulls a guitar out from the crawl space and all of us climb up to the rooftop terrace. While we stand there there's a quick northerly breeze full of fresh flowery goodness that fills our nostrils for just a second and Cara starts to strum her guitar and we do whatever it is we do in lieu of singing, we hum or we lightly moan or we slap our knees or we just close our eyes, shut the hell up, and listen.

OUR MOM-AND-POP OPIUM DEN

O
ur mom-and-pop opium den is being forced out of business by a big-box opium den. Our regulars are pissed. My father and I are despondent. I stare across the street at the “Grand Opening” banner spread across Opium Depot's facade, at the huge inflatable gorilla tethered to their roof, at their strolling mariachis, at their free hot dogs and free pony rides. I wonder if we'll be out of business in weeks or just days.

“Fuck Opium Depot,” Jake Stensman tells me. “Screw those corporate fucks.”

Jake's twenty-three years old, a Marine just back from Afghanistan. He's wearing a gray T-shirt with the words “Semper Fi Mofo” silkscreened on the front of it. The tattooed names of his dead friends scroll down his tanned arms like a royal proclamation. Last week he told me he hears his dead friends screaming whenever he closes his eyes. His dead friends scream and scream and they don't ever stop.

“Live local! Buy local!” he yells across the street.

Jake's red-faced now, but soon he'll be so high that all the ruddiness and anger in his body will float away. In a few minutes, he'll be lying in one of our smoking beds and the only thing he'll care about is taking an occasional breath.

“How about a protest?” Allen Cho suggests. “How about we walk around in a circle in front of their entrance wearing sandwich boards and chanting?”

Allen Cho's daughter drowned in a lake two years ago. Allen sees his daughter in his dreams, her long, reedy arms reaching out to pull him down into the murky deep. There's always lots of mud on her face and algae and sticks intertwined into her billowing hair. Other than some bloating, Allen says, her face looks exactly the same as the day she died.

“If it didn't look like her,” he jokes, “I wouldn't need to be here, right?”

While everyone looks across the street, I sit down at my desk to decide which bills to pay this month. Electric or water? Gas or phone? I wonder if our power got turned off would anyone notice? Could I light some scented candles from my dead mother's curio cabinet and just tell everyone I'm trying for more ambiance?

I rip up a past due notice about our mortgage and my father pads around stuffing everyone's pipes. The doctors tell me to surround him with familiar things, to keep him on a regular schedule. The doctors tell me he will have good and bad days. At first, they tell me, the bad days will be equally bad for both him and me. Then the bad days will get subtly better for him and significantly worse for me. At some point my father's realization of what a bad day is or isn't will slide from his consciousness and this fact will cleave my heart into a number of tiny pieces but luckily leave him unfazed. He'll get a lot better when he gets a little worse, the doctors say.

“How about a huge sale?” Jennie Frontiere asks. “Show their asses you're here for the long haul.”

None of our asses is here for the long haul, especially Jennie's. She's got bone cancer and opium is the only thing that deadens the ache in her arms and legs. Sometimes she tries to knit mittens for her grandchildren, but after a hit on the pipe her knitting needles slide out of her fingers and clatter to the floor.

“What about promotional punch cards?” Jake suggests. “Ten pipes, the eleventh is free?”

The line snaking out Opium Depot's door curls down our block. I scan it for familiar faces, for any customers of ours they've already poached. My dad keeps busy. He fluffs pillows, brews a fresh pot of decaf.

Our place looks almost exactly the same as when he opened the doors thirty years ago. Red and gold walls. Silk tassels hanging from every goddamn thing. I've worked the register since I was eight and for the last twenty years I've watched hundreds of people kill themselves slowly and convincingly. It makes me sad to think I probably won't get to see our current group of regulars meet their maker too.

My father pushes dirty sheets into the washing machine, pulls clean ones from the dryer. Outside our doors, all bets are off, but inside here, he's still a huge help to me. Inside here, he can sometimes make me forget he forgets.

“We've outlasted everyone before,” he says. “We'll just do it again, right?”

The memory loss chatrooms tell me to pick my battles, to try to keep his stress level low. All the commenters advise me to conserve my energy for the long haul ahead. Why deliver bad news when you'll need to deliver the same bad news in five minutes, they say, and then again two minutes after that?

“Of course we will,” I say. “We'll bring those assholes to their knees.”

Allen, Jake, and Jennie shuffle back to their beds, jonesing for their next hit. I walk around and light their pipes. When I'm done I flop down on an open bed and my father lights me up.

“Maybe this will clarify things,” I yell out to everyone before I inhale. “Maybe we'll get some better ideas after this.”

So yes, instead of fighting Opium Depot, what we decide to do in this case is to wait it out, hope for strength or illumination to descend from above. What we do in this case is smoke.

In this case?

In every case.

W
hen I wake up later there's a bright yellow piece of paper stuffed into my mouth. It's a promotional flyer from Opium Depot. All my regulars have them in their mouths too. Someone from Opium Depot waltzed through our doors while we were zonked out and leafleted our asses.

My father's asleep on his cot. He used to be a light sleeper, awakened by the tiniest floorboard creak. Now you have to poke him in the chest for a minute straight before he'll open his eyes.

“Help me gather up those flyers before everyone wakes up,” I tell him. “If they find out how cheap it is over there, we're finished.”

My father rubs the sleep from his eyes, threads his toes into his flip-flops. I grab his forearm, steady him as he stands. His knees are bad from all the up and down that occurs in this business. He had his right knee replaced last year. His left one is giving him trouble now, clicking and popping. I wonder if we should just skip replacing it. Maybe he'll just forget he's in pain? Or maybe soon he'll forget what pain even is? I jot down a note to ask the doctors about this at our next appointment.

While we grab the flyers, I look over at the counter and see that while I was nodding off my dad bought a huge bag of fortune cookies at the Asian market down the street, snapped the cookies in half, and then pulled out all the fortunes. There are at least a hundred fortunes spitballed on the counter. This is the second time my father's done this in the last week, leaving crumbs all over the countertop and the floor. Lately he treats fortune cookies like they're pull tabs or scratch-offs, like one of them will be a winner, like he's searching for a phrase he's waited his entire life to be told.

“Dad,” I say. “We talked about you leaving here alone, right?”

“I went out for a little bit,” he says. “I needed a break. I needed some goddamn sunshine.”

After our visit to the doctor last week, my father and I had a frank discussion about his condition, about the safety measures we needed to implement to keep him safe. The doctors keep suggesting I put him in assisted care, with prepared meals and around-the-clock care. Strangely, the doctors always clam up whenever I ask them where to get the money to pay for all that.

“I don't like the new rules either,” I tell him, “but we need to keep you alive.”

My dad opens and closes his hands while we talk, balling his fingers into fists and then fanning them out wide. The doctors warned me there might be some initial frustration when the new rules were put in place, that things between the two of us might get physical. My guard is up. My dad's in good shape, he still looks like he could land a decent uppercut.

“Are you forbidding me to come and go?” he asks.

Today's a good day for him, a day of complete sentences. Today's not a day of him hiding underneath our kitchen table or pissing in the snake plant. Today's not a day of him calling me William, his dead brother's name. Today my father isn't cupping
his forehead and telling me how his brain feels swollen, that it feels like there's a gallon of water sloshing around inside his skull.

While we talk, I stare across the street at Opium Depot, at that huge inflatable gorilla perched on their roof, its hands held above its head in victory. Their parking lot is packed, cars circling around waiting for a spot to open up. Their valets sprint past our window in their blue windbreakers and black pants, tracking down cars they've stashed in their overflow lot.

“It's for your own good,” I tell my dad.

My dad stares me down in the same way he stared me down when I was in high school and I smashed his Buick through our garage door. I look down at the floor to avoid his gaze. While I'm looking down there I see a black ant skitter across the air vent toward a fortune cookie crumb, but before the ant gets there the air conditioning kicks on and it gets shot up in the air. The ant floats there above the ground for a second, defying gravity, its tiny legs moving willy-nilly until he falls down into the vent and probably dies.

“I can,” my dad says, before losing his train of thought.

“I still am,” he says, his voice quiet, drifting off.

W
as everything always this dire? No, no, not this dire. Two years ago, I returned home from grad school with big ideas. I hired a graphic designer to print glossy brochures. I installed Wi-Fi. I bought a new couch for the lobby. I repainted the bathrooms sea-foam green, stocked healthy snacks in the vending machines. I marketed our space as a perfect option for a bachelor or bachelorette party. My father was skeptical about the impact these improvements would have on our bottom line, but he stopped questioning me after our quarterly profits shot up 14 percent.

Unfortunately around this time, my fiancée, Susie, broke off our engagement. We'd already sent out save-the-date cards and
booked the reception hall. We had the cake tasting, I'd rented my tux. Then one night, after a company happy hour, she fucked her boss, Rodney Pargo, in my car.

“You were practical,” she told me, “but I won't be happy with practical. I need some excitement. I need someone who gets my nipples hard, someone like Rodney, who drives around with a ladder in the back of his Chevy Tahoe in case he wants to break into the zoo and make the tigers or bears watch him make love.” I'd already planned out my life with Susie, was shocked at her sudden betrayal. I turned to the pipe to stop thinking about how much I missed her round ass and her raunchy sense of humor, how much I missed that great lasagna she made. I turned to the pipe to forget how my car smelled like cherry lube whenever I turned on the heater. I turned to the pipe because no matter how much fucking Windex I sprayed Rodney Pargo's greasy footprints would not come off my windshield.

T
his morning I call the memory loss helpline and tell them I'm scared of my father wandering off.

“Tape a black carpet square in front of your door,” the counselor on the phone advises. “He'll think it's a hole. He'll think it's the abyss and he won't want to fall inside. It works great.”

“That sounds cruel,” I say.

“A lot of people say that,” the guy says, “but you need to realize that at this point in your father's life safety and cruelty sometimes walk hand in hand.”

I duct tape the carpet square to the floor, watch as my dad bends down to peer into its inky void.

“How did that get here?” he asks. He's leaning away from the carpet square like it has a gravitational pull, like he's going to be sucked in.

“It's a floor mat,” I tell him.

“I hate that I can't see the bottom of it,” he says. “I hate that I can't see where it ends, you know?”

Our regulars are in between pipes. Jake sets down his tattoo magazine and walks over to stand next to me. Last week he brought in a six-pack and we sat in the alley and had a heart-to-heart. He told me how his father died at Costco lugging a shitload of Greek yogurt to his truck, how my dad reminds me of his dad.

“You need a break?” he asks. “I can watch the shop if you wanna get out of here for an hour.”

I look over at my dad. He's sitting at the counter now, picking at a roast beef sandwich, studying the carpet square from across the room. Soon his upper body starts to do this rocking thing, back and forth, over and over. I put my hand on his shoulder so he stops. “That would be great,” I tell Jake.

E
verything still reminds me of Susie and Opium Depot is no different. It's tastefully lit, just like her condo was. There's a greeter at the front door whose dark hair is sort of close to the color of Susie's dark hair. The greeter is wearing a blue polo that looks kind of similar to a blue polo I remember Susie maybe wearing once or twice.

“I'm Samantha,” she says. “Would you like a bed?”

I scan the floor. I've got to hand it to them, they've got this all figured out. Rows and rows of beds with individual separation screens. Identically dressed pipe tenders walking around in T-shirts and khakis. A central dispensary behind bulletproof glass. Security cameras mounted to the ceiling every twenty feet. The air conditioning is cranking like we're in a casino.