Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (27 page)

Looking at her, though, I think, right then, she's someone who could help me do the first right thing I've done in some time.

“Do you really want to be with Toby?” I say.

She droops and glazes in the backseat.

“I'm taking the GED. He supports me,” she says.

“Why would you quit school? You live in Pittsford.”

“You try serving up ice cream at Abbott's, and having some ex-boyfriend that's at every show you go to.”

“I've known Toby for a long time,'” I tell her. “Has he told you why he brought you out here? Has he told you that out of boredom he tried to convince me my best friend was a serial arsonist? Has he told you this?”

She looks at the car's floor.

“Give Toby three months, he will bring you to a bar so his friends can lick tequila out of your navel. Give Toby three years, he'll shove aside the dinner you make. He will never have enough money to take you anywhere. We can Springsteen this car back home, while he's still in there. We can unkill the time we've lost tonight.”

I let the crickets, the occasional car that breathes by, help my point sink in.

“Are you hitting on me?” she says.

Toby walks out of the store, silhouette only visible in the store light. He strains the shocks when he angles, ass-first, into the backseat next to his girlfriend.

“And we're off! Commander Spock, take us away!” he says,
holding the girl's hand. He cracks open a beer one-handed and opens the bottle of tequila.

I drive onto 104, which noodles out past towns like Holley and Albion that are maybe the size of a tic-tac-toe board on a map. Towns that have 1
^st
St. or an on-a-whim 5
^th
Ave., like they'd wanted to start a city, but only got as far as one or two lights on at night and maybe one smokestack, where a large, muscular arm of smoke might reach upward, until sunrise.

Toby says something into the girl's ear. In the rearview mirror, I see the girl stretch out, like she has to think with her body.

“Well, I guess there was one other guy,” I hear her say. She murmurs something else, and pushes his sweat-shiny palm away from her dress. “I don't know. I'm not mean like you.”

There appear to be steroids in the air. Toby gets bigger by the breath.

But when I pull into the Kove lot, there's a sushi restaurant in its place, dark inside and closed for the evening, with an awning that has some Japanese lettering, some tiny bamboo plants on the windowsills.

Toby gets out of the car, leaving the door open, just before I come to a full stop. The girl gets out after him. His voice sounds like it's been strung up and hanged; he grips his forehead-fat with his hands: “Oh no no no no. Oh no no no no. Come on. No.”

Toby runs to the restaurant's door, stabs the Kove Key at the keyhole, and hurls the Kove Key across the street, where there's a gated-off dirt lot, further off, and a Home Depot that has large letters that spell
COMING SOON
across the windows.

It's late enough, and getting cold enough, to see our breath in the light from the street lamps. The girl plants one hand on her hip.

“What,” Toby says to her. Their bodies are backlit in a way where you can see their arm hair from far away. I stay by the car, to give them the idea that I can't hear them argue.

“You didn't say it'd be this far out,” she says. “I have to be home. I told you we have my parents' boat.”

Toby jams the heels of his hands into both sides of his temples three times, audibly. She sticks her jaw out, like she's ready to yell, but Toby cuts her off:

“Oh my
GOD!
You always do this!” he says, spit leaping off his lower lip. “Whenever I make a wrong turn, whenever I write down the wrong address. I provide the money! I provide the car! That's something I do.”

Toby pulls her in, arms like chompers on the back of a garbage truck. “It's just that I try so hard,” he says, lips pressed into her scalp, “and all I want is to die all the time.”

Since I'm calling this evening over, I twirl my keys around my index finger. But suddenly I feel a scrape on my knuckle and my keys are gone, because Toby has just yanked my key ring off my finger, hooked the girl's body with one arm, and opened the driver's side rear door and slammed it shut. He slaps down all the locks on the windowsills and immediately grabs the girl by her hair and facebombs her on the lips. I hear her gag and try to say something, and Toby's suctioning her whole face practically, and something creaks in the car, and a handprint smears on the window, and I see Toby's fist under the back of her shirt, and the girl's hair mats up against the
glass, and Toby almost rolls into the seat well, and the car shakes when he palms the floor, and then I see the girl's hand, trying to push Toby's face away, and then I realize Toby's trying to rape her, and my chest clenches into a trash compactor, and every other building is closed, and I look down, and I find I'm poised, somehow, like a shortstop, but just standing there, knees bent, and all I can say to myself is Oh God Oh God Oh God, because the girl yells, “Please no!”—muffled by Toby's chest, and the glass begins to fog up, and she jams a thumb in Toby's eye, and, with a cylinder pump, Toby pins her arm to the seat.

I slap the windshield with my palms. I climb on the roof. I slap the rear window, through which I see—Oh Please God No—Toby bracing his legs against the passenger-side door, holding the girl down with his shoulder while he wrestles with his fly and, hooking his thumbs into his shorts, shoves them down his thighs.

She screams, over and over. Then, for exactly one second, my eyes meet hers.

Her pupils are tightened to the size of pencil pricks. I don't even know if she sees me. I think, maybe, three minutes before this, she was some girl who liked that band the October Project, or whatever short-haired lady did that song “Bohemia” that BER played when I used to station-surf while doing my homework.

Because, the nearest payphone is Godhowevermany miles away. Because, if I even try to call police, then I'm leaving this girl alone with Toby. I punch the window as hard as I can, and seconds later I open my eyes and I'm on
the ground, doubled over my hand, nearly choking to death. I yell something that's not a word to nobody in particular. I give a half-running start, but I don't commit to it as much as I should, but when I extend my foot, I connect, and then a yardstick-sized spike of pain shoots up my right ass-cheek through my shoulder when I land on the gravel. When I look up, there's a heel-shaped crunch in the glass. Toby and the girl are sitting up, staring straight ahead. The doors are unlocked. No cars come by. It's so quiet above us. You can hear the mist in the air.

Future Nate is screaming at the TV: Take him to the police! But when I get in the car my brain is in a flooded crawlspace, and the only way out is to get Toby away from us. When I pull into his house's driveway, he opens the door, looks at us, looks to the sky, and screams the weirdest thing I've ever heard.

“Each one of us!” he says. “Each one of us, are two ballerinas, turning, falling, infinitely. Never knowing—when we'll land.”

My headlights blare against Toby's garage. He slams the door and walks across his front lawn. In the grass, there's a wooden cutout of a woman in a bonnet bending over to garden something.

When I get back on 490, I shake my head, and hope Toby's girlfriend notices it.

“Sorry,” I say.

I can hear her sniffling. On the highway, there's a pair of headlights way off on the horizon behind me, a pair of brake lights way off on the horizon in front of me.

“Any one of these gas stations has a payphone,” I say. “We can call the police there.”

“Don't condescend to me,” she says.

Which I ignore. “Do you need anything? Police? Coffee?” I say. “I'm not tired at all.”

At her house, she opens my car door as little as possible, slips out, and eases the door shut so that the latch barely clicks and my Door Ajar light stays on.

Here's something else, which is either terrific or another picture for the Failed Plan Hall of Fame Calendar.

Years later, at Eastview Mall, way after this story ends, I go into the Sears to buy a mini drain snake for my kitchen sink. My head is down when I enter the store, and a girl is just passing opposite me, walking out toward Eastview's main concourse. She almost walks past my blind spot when I realize, suddenly, who she might be. I turn around, and only see the back of her head. She's pushing a baby stroller. Some guy with a collared short-sleeve shirt and good triceps, sitting on a bench underneath a tree, stands up to meet her. He hangs his arm around her. I want to think she smiles here. Her orange and baby-blue clothing lead me to believe the girl is Toby's once-girlfriend.

I have a good track record of this, of going a long time without seeing people and recognizing them years later, far past the point after they've stopped recognizing me. It's her I'm seeing, walking past the display Kia Sedona being raffled off and the teenage girls wearing short skirts and the sunglasses kiosk and the hot-pretzel smell. I could catch up to her. I could talk to her, vaporize some guilt right then. I even
stand there; I even debate myself over this, for a good four minutes. I even walk after her a few steps, before I lose sight of her completely. Afterward, I buy what I need and spend a half-hour at the pet store aquariums, looking at the neon tetras and the clown loaches. Bright-colored fish that begin dying the second you bring them home in plastic bags.

Walking out of the 3-Mezz elevator, way down the cinder-block hallway, there's a red door on the left labeled
VENTILATION.
Through that door, a large aluminum ventilation shaft, wide as a dump truck, angles gradually downward from the ceiling as I walk, a football field's walk, to where the shaft meets the opposite wall. In the three-foot space below where the vent meets the wall, on the floor, in the dark, I find a white blanket and pillow.

The pillow's stuffing is bunched up into three or four knots. If this were
The Proto-Stachening of Nate: The Movie
, this would be where I discover a dead body or a Grail. I fold the pillow in half and set my head on it. The heat from the vent is lint-scented, strong enough to warm the gray-painted concrete floor. I close my eyes, feel my leg twitch and my eyeballs crazy-dance—“Good evening, sir, welcome to Club Sleepybats,” the doorman says, and unlatches the velvet rope.

On other days, I make more Sleepybats: to get through an hour when the conveyors are turned off; to beat back a
hangover until it's speck-sized in my head; to relax after the 10 a.m. canister rush.

Then, one morning, a Friday shift, I'm flung awake by a noise that sounds like the entire building gagging up a house-sized cube of iron.

Red lights, suddenly, go on everywhere. An alarm sounds, apocalyptic, low, like an angry dial tone, loud enough to give you a nosebleed. My cleansuit wedgies when I run down the hallway. I can't hear my footsteps. “Nathan Gray. Please call 1184. Nathan Gray. 1184,” the PA says. I harpoon my hand to the doorjamb and swing around back into the chemical recycling room, where canisters are backed up across the entire length of the conveyor. “Nathan Gray. 1184.” I plug my ear with my right finger and, with my left hand, pull what canisters I can off the line.

Then, I hear a loud click, which echoes through 3-Mezz's steel beams, and the alarm sound winds down, getting lower-pitched and quieter. Yelling arrives from down the hall. Two men who I have never seen before, in white cleansuits and hairnets, jog toward the bag dispenser. I realize I have no idea what color anybody's hair is here. One of the men, carrying a clipboard, presses the dispenser's green Go button repeatedly, and corkscrews violently toward me.

“What happened?” he shrieks. I can't tell if he has eyebrows. The boniness of his face makes his sweat extra shiny.

“Is the line stopped?” I say.

“Jesus
Christ
!” He wings the clipboard to the floor, where it tumbles over itself and skids until it hits a pallet of spare bag rolls. “I've never seen this. Never once in my
twenty-two years.” The men swing their arms hard walking away.

“Colonel Hellstache,” I mumble.

The clipboard man wide-strides back to me and points his nose down at my eyebrows. I feel my tear ducts squirming. “What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“The
fuck
, did you say?” His face is shaking.

“I didn't say anything. ‘Crap.' I said ‘crap.'”

He walks away, swiping his arm down to pick up the clipboard. I make a crossbar with my left arm and uppercut my right bicep into it to make a giant middle finger.

Because, I've started saying phrases to myself, mostly to get them back—Maverick Jetpants, Colonel Hellstache, Hashbrown Gargoyle. Because it's not my fault I hate my job. Not my fault I'm in this huge room, and can hurl canisters against the wall all twelve hours without anybody noticing.

After 6 p.m. relief, the locker room belt rack on the wall has belts hanging down that are almost as tall as me. Pictures of old Jordache models curl on the brown, blistering paint on the insides of men's lockers. Mustached men, who no longer care if anyone sees their dicks in the shower, shower.