Nothing Is Terrible (22 page)

“For what?”

“So that I can scout it out.”

“But what do you scout it out
for
?”

“You just look at it and touch it and think about it.”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing.”

“I think I have ankle cancer. Can you get that? Look at this thing. What is this thing?”

“I have a poem,” he blurted.

“What kind of poem?”

“Well, it’s a non-rhyming poem about trees. Just a regular poem. And in a way it’s also about you. Oh, and also it’s written by, um, me.”

“You wrote a poem about me?”

“In a way.”

“Mittler, I can’t stand you. Can I see it?”

He looked away and handed me a piece of paper with a handwritten poem on it. This is the poem:

We strolled a long time through the woods of northern Manhattan holding hands. I spoke to Mittler of how I loved his poem. I asked him not to be afraid of me. He denied my request.

He told me my exercise suit was hideous. I asked him to look at my ankle and tell me if he thought there was any cancer on it. He said I should lean against a tree which he identified as a lollygag pine or something. Bending slightly, he lifted my foot up to his face and inspected the ankle in question. “I don’t know what the hell it is but it’s definitely not cancer. I think we should make our bed by this tree, which will protect us.”

“You want to sleep in Central Park?”

“I do it all the time.”

“I don’t. How do you know the tree will protect us?”

“It’s a feeling.”

“What’s the feeling?”

“Like a dark voice.”

We had walked and talked a long time. The sun that had been shining on the top of Mittler’s hunting-and-gathering head now shone on the side of his head and his left ear as he faced north and gazed adoringly at the tree. I waited by the tree while he retrieved his tent and other things from the other benevolent tree. Two big black boys my age walked by along a path. One of them was bald and the other had long braids. They stared at me. I was scared. Mittler came back and I told him I didn’t want to sleep in Central Park. He said the tree would protect me and he would too. He constructed his small, low, unobtrusive tent that you could not sit up in. He gathered fallen white birch bark and wood and made a fire. He cooked lentils, which he had soaked the previous night under a rock at Sixty-seventh Street. To the lentils he added garlic and carrots and diced celery and zucchini and basil and salt and pepper and, toward the end, a tomato. His resourcefulness was a comfort to me, even as I realized how helpless I would be with no one to feed me. We ate and I burned my tongue, which ruined
the meal. The sun had set and the sky was deep violet. We slid into his little tube tent. It was so close in there that I breathed in the air he breathed out, and vice versa. Our bodies were pressed together. I felt bloated and gassy, while he was getting excited. There wasn’t room for us to get our clothes off so he made two quick openings in our clothes and fucked me. I had to pee, which hurt. Also, because we were so tight in there, he scraped my neck with his face hairs. I started to feel scared, as if he were stabbing me over and over with that penis. But I was also excited and wanted him to keep doing it. Mittler was pretty good at control, but you know how boys are at that age, reader. His body quaked and his penis got extra stiff and large just to tantalize me before he burst and yelled and went slack. He lay on top of me. I know how dreamy and delicate anyone—even a boy—feels after that explosion. I wanted to be sweet with him the way he usually tried to be with me after sex—except when he was all freaked out and had to leave—but I was also mad at him for having sex with me when I had to pee and for getting me all excited, so I made him keep thrusting even though he said doing that made the skin all over his body feel funny in a bad way. I made him keep doing it and doing it and nothing happened and then we were both mad at each other. Then I made him escort me out of the tent to pee. We went back into the tent and fell asleep pressed up against each other, mad.

I woke up in the middle of the night having to pee again. I asked him to come out with me again. He said no. I said pretty please and he said no. I asked him if he had a flashlight. He told me I wouldn’t need a flashlight because it was New York City, that I should look up at the sky when I got outside the tent and I’d see that it was not black as it would be in nature
but pale red like the skin surrounding a wound that could not properly heal. I walked outside and gazed up at the soft pink glow and found it soothing. Gazing at the sky, I peed standing up in my special way. I walked back to the tent and felt a sharp discomfort in the bottom of my left foot. Every time I tried to place my foot on the ground the discomfort grew worse. I hopped the last few yards to the tent and felt the bottom of my foot with my hand. It was wet. I looked at my fingers and the wetness was dark or black. I touched the bottom of my foot again and now I felt the sharp discomfort on two of my fingers as well. I told Mittler and he said, “Wait here.” He raced off skillfully along the dark, uneven ground. He came back several minutes later with a kerosene lamp. He lit the lamp and together we looked at the bottom of my left foot. A long sliver of green glass stuck up out of it, surrounded by thick red blood. He pulled gently at the glass. It sort of kept coming out of my foot. It wasn’t so much a sliver as a wide piece of jagged glass, much of which had been inside the flesh of my foot. When it was all the way out, a lot more blood pumped up out of the cut and onto Mittler and the lip of Mittler’s tent and the ground. He inspected the opening in my foot and removed some little shards. He took off his T-shirt and wrapped it around the foot and raced off along the ground again, not tumbling or falling or stepping on glass himself. He came back with a first-aid kit. “Where do you get all this stuff?”

“Trees.”

He cleaned the wound and injected my foot with a local anesthetic. He sewed the bottom of my foot like the best girl in home ec class.

“How do you know how to do all this stuff?”

“I read books.”

“So do I.”

“Then you must know how to do stuff too.”

“I know how to recite a poem by heart.”

“My poem?” he said, and stopped sewing me, and looked up at me hopefully with his mouth open.

“No, silly, I just read your poem once a few hours ago. How could I have memorized it?”

“Oh.” He sewed more flesh and was sad. When finished he said, “We should try to get some sleep now.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“I am not sleeping in a broken glass jungle with a hurt foot. I want soft pillows or I’m breaking off the relationship.”

“Well, isn’t that just typical. The same day I give you my best poem you’re
breaking off the relationship
just because something sharp went in your foot.”

“Take me home.”

He did. On piggyback. At first he ran but I told him that the bouncing hurt my foot, so then he walked swiftly, quietly, and smoothly. At three
A.M
. on this hot summer morning, Mittler carried me up the stone steps to the door of my house. He was strong and quiet and handsome and wet.

“I’ll just check on Hoving and we can go to sleep,” I said, unlocking the top lock.

“I am honor bound not to sleep in this house.”

“You are an asshole chickenshit.”

“I am already acting against a principle I hold dear.”

“What principle?”

“No adultery.”

“How about the principle of not leaving someone alone with a hurt foot?”

“Come to my house.”

“Asshole.”

I looked in on the old man, who sat in bed silently mouthing words, his arms stretched out along his small legs, palms up as if in supplication.

I went to the bedroom of the erstwhile couple and opened the drawer where Skip kept roughly $10,000 in walking-around money. I grabbed a stack of twenties and joined Mittler on the street, where we had a moral struggle about whether to take a cab, which I won.

At his condemned house I told Mittler I couldn’t sleep in his hammock with him because my foot needed not to be touching anything. He gathered rectangular naked foam-rubber mats from around the building and laid them down on the floor of his room, one adjacent to the next, creating a soft place for two people to sleep. I told him I did not want him sleeping next to me because he might inadvertently kick my foot in his sleep, plus I needed to be alone without anyone touching me so he should just get up into his damn hammock. He did. We lay in the semidark, I on my adjacent foam-rubber rectangles, he in his hammock above me, not sleeping. I watched the rhombuses of pale light move across the ceiling as the cars and trucks passed on Houston Street.

An hour into our silence Mittler blurted, “You’re not grateful I cared for you with my survival skills.”

I told him, using the term
dipshit
, that he was the whole reason I
had
a cut foot, and so much for our having been protected by his stupid tree, et cetera. He intimated that the tree was maybe trying to teach me a lesson and I asked him what sort of lesson and he said it was for the tree to teach and me to learn. I said that yes, in fact he was right, that indeed the lesson
was not to spend time with him, Mittler, again, ever, and I hopped down the stairs of Mittler’s condemned building.

Chetty lay asleep on the soft, damp bed of sand that was piled up against the building on the sidewalk. The sun, which just now rose over the borough of Queens, cast a few rays of orange light on the bottoms of Chetty’s dirty, naked, east-facing feet. I hopped down to Houston Street and caught a cab home.

Home was not the comfy place it once had been. The house smelled bad. Cockroaches and mice strolled the floors and countertops of the kitchen. Dust was general over the rugs, the stairs, the hallways and books. It had been dirty before, but the dirt had not been embedded in the infrastructure as it was now. Outside my window the air grew cold and dark, and trees whose names I did not know gave up their leaves.

It was all I could do to prevent a mold from consuming the skin and mouth of the old man. I rarely left the house. I thought of the two people I loved best moving over the surface of the earth. I thought of all the things they did and said and were. I hated the stupid way I flitted from one to the other, causing harm in my inimitable carefree manner. I wished to be certain of anything. I spent days at a time in bed reading books. I read
The Children’s Hour
and
Tea and Sympathy
and
Woodworking for Morons
and
The Cake Bible
and
Prolegomena
and
Tales of Love
and
A Lover’s Discourse
and
Seven Types of Ambiguity
and
Amongst Women
and
The Long Lavender Look
and
Berlin Stories
and
The High Peaks Trail Guide
and
Divorce Talk
and
On Death and Dying
and
Civilization and Its Discontents
and
Playing and Reality
and
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, by Gibbon. I don’t know Gibbon’s first name. Few
people do, but everyone knows that you have to say “Gibbon” after you say
“Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
That is not something you learn from books but from living with people who read them.

I didn’t run, reader, I didn’t sprint. I didn’t bounce on the bed. I didn’t punch or tackle anyone, or take a walk. I wiped the skin of Hoving with a warm, soapy cloth, and succumbed to lethargy, and was seventeen.

In the middle of December, Tommy got out of jail and Skip Hartman moved back to New York City. First thing she did: hired a cleaning service. Second thing: bought calf-length flower-print skirts and pretty clips for her thick gray hair that now hung halfway down her back. She announced that she did not wish to sleep in the bed that I was sleeping in. I volunteered to move in with Hoving, whom I liked. I set up a cot in the living room, shut off the lights, undressed, and inserted my naked body into a sleeping bag on top of the cot in much the same way as I remembered the slick, bare glans of Mittler’s penis, grown soft, sliding back into the clothlike sheath of his foreskin after he made love to me.

Hoving screamed. “What is it?” I asked.

“I cannot tolerate the darkness,” he said, half reclining on his seven pillows, for he did not ever lie down that I knew of. “I must be able to look down and see my own body in the middle of the night, else how do I know it is there?”