Super Flat Times (16 page)
Feeling lonely?
Before I lost my wife I had only ever hit one other person, and that was in junior high. His face is like a cotton swab in my memory now — he floats there in slow motion, holding a black book bag over his groin outside the locker room. It’s the Sesquicentennial and we’re getting out early to see the tall robots. I remember the scent of a person, the way it changes the air in a room. Louis Burney smelled like hair and lighter fluid — he came from the developments, where kids pissed out their territory and traveled in herds. I hit him in the gut — the reason isn’t so important anymore. The sound, though, is the thing. Like two sounds at once — and one of them is like the whole world just lifting up and folding over.
Feeling fearful?
When I tell people that my wife and I terminated our relationship, what I really mean is that one day I came home from work and she was gone. It was not so much the things she took with her that made me fearful, but what she left behind: two sweaters, yellow and brown (which I had given her — coincidence?), the remote control for a VCR that she took, a set of fine German knives, subscription bills for
Solder & Wire
and
Bulletin of the People of the Living Phone
magazines, three large plants whose lives I am now wholly responsible for, and a journal, blank but for the upper right margin of each even page, where the phrase “had fun” is marked in her telltale cursive. When I knew she wasn’t coming back I gathered the items in the living room. Humped there on the floor, they seemed to twitch and breathe, like real animals. I slept for two and a half days.
Having ideas or beliefs that others do not share?
Breathing into a plastic bag changes the humidity in a room. A carpet knife can be useful in the removal of ingrown toenails. Not all bad people are French, but all French people are bad. Select meats, when buried for six months or longer in fertile soil, can be used as a medicinal poultice. My brother’s arms are kept in a jar at the county medical examiner’s office downtown. Two nails in a board will weaken its integrity, but not three or seven. The earth is bulging over Canada. When the light hit him just right, my father looked like an outboard motor — pull the cord and off he’d go. People’s breath is almost always more important than what they say. Lifting weights will get you nowhere. When rain falls, something else is always going up. Shoes are for the weak.
Blaming yourself for things?
There were holes in our basement walls where the enemy soldiers were shot during War H. We dug around the foundation of the house, but our search for their remains was fruitless. We had more luck with the arrowheads. Scott earned a merit badge with his collection. The rest of us couldn’t make it further than Tenderfoot. I learned to masturbate in a tent with two other boys and when I came, the lights went out. I saw visions — what I thought then to be the devil’s palm pressing my face into the sleeping bag. The other two had done it before, and only nodded when I recounted what had happened. Later my dick grew to twice its normal size. I panicked but the others reassured me. “Rest it up awhile,” they said, kneeling by the fire.
Hearing voices that other people do not hear?
My mother would break things — I heard it through the wall. Later in life, the same sound would crop up unexpectedly — at an important business meeting, say. Once I heard a whole flotilla of saucers hit the floor while boarding a bus for New Livonia. As for voices, I can’t say for sure, especially on condition that they’re not mine. Part of me talks in another language, which is like having an itch you can’t scratch, or when you’re holding a screaming child. I’d hit the kid, which is why my tubes are tied. You won’t see any more of me once I’ve left this earth. That’s one thing I’ve always had a corner on, so to speak.
Repeated unpleasant thoughts that won’t leave your mind?
I play the trumpet, and I do most of my unpleasant thinking when I am practicing. If the image of someone smashing my face into the curb, teeth first, rushes into my mind while I’m playing, for instance, my lips will tend to purse instantly. Other things I think about are the sound of two hollow metal tubes colliding end on end, catching a nail with my eyelid, silverware that has not been cleaned, how much a snakebite would hurt, climbing somewhere and not being able to get down, getting a paper cut on my eyeball, the lottery, having my knees bent the wrong way, swimming headlong into the propeller blades of a ship, having my teeth sanded down to sharp points, genital self-examinations, competitive sports, who will be wearing my organs when I die, and the fear that I am slowly bleeding to death from the inside.
Having to repeat the same actions, such as touching, counting, washing?
When I touch things, I can hear them break. I can hear the sound they will make in the future. I touch lots of things. When I touch a person I can know her faults. If I’m touching someone on the top of the head, I know exactly where his weak points are. The same is true for animals. My neighbor, in the life I used to fool people with, had an Irish setter named Pippin. “Here, Pip, come on, boy,” he would say to the dog from his porch door. I held the dog’s snout in my hands, and it told me about all of my neighbor’s secrets because it hated him. He was a wife swapper, which explained all the nice cars in the driveway. “You’re a good boy,” I would say to the dog, slapping its hindquarters, “you’re a good old boy.”
The idea that you should be punished for your sins?
My father owned a horse farm and drove trucks and cars into the quarry for extra cash or food. We could see them sometimes from the rope swing — bruised forms sulking at the bottom.
I pulled my first pair of pants down near that same quarry. It was late evening; Dad nearly ran us down on his way to the water’s edge. We were hiding in the tall grass. My dick made a sucking sound, like a bad drain. Her name was Pam — she started to cry in the darkness.
Later that summer we attended an outdoor piano concert. We didn’t think to bring a blanket, so we sat on the grass. The piano was like a thousand knives hitting me in the chest, one after the other. I would not see Pam again. She is pregnant now, living somewhere in one of those big boxlike states. I burned all of my pictures of her, something I’ve come to regret more than almost anything else, after all this time.
Feeling afraid you will faint in public?
In grade school we had an assembly. A man came to talk to us about the dangers of smoking. He had a hole in his throat and spoke with the assistance of a small machine. The room was dark; we were shown slides of the operation. One shot showed a nurse slipping her finger into the hole, right down to her knuckle. I started to see colors. Everything was far off, all of a sudden. I made my way to the back of the auditorium, where I collapsed, vomiting my lunch by the ticket booth. A guidance counselor found me there and admonished me for trying to duck out. “I’m sick,” I told him, wiping my face on my sleeve. “Nice try,” he said, dragging me back to my seat. “Nice try.” I thought this event would follow me for the rest of my life, but soon enough everyone was already on to the next thing.
The idea that someone else can control your thoughts?
We made sure our linens were dull and muted in color. Gray on maroon, navy on black, brown on black. My wife was concerned that bright colors would hurt the house. She drew the shades whenever there was a thunderstorm because the lightning put streaks in the linoleum. She had a thing about light — she wore tinted glasses in the house, which made her look like someone from another time. It made her teeth look like big planks. She was like somebody’s understudy in those glasses. When we fought I would make a bonfire in the backyard because I knew she would not follow me there. I could see her watching me through the attic window, sucking on an inhaler. I’d throw another log on the fire, sending a volley of sparks high into the air. This nearly always made her disappear for a few hours. Sometimes it rained. This, to her, meant victory.
Other people being aware of your private thoughts?
I didn’t like the way my life felt on me. Cumbersome as an old jacket. I visited dark places, bars with an entrance at both ends. I never used that back door that I can remember, but its presence there was essential. Somebody was always throwing darts. “Jesus,” I would think to myself, “those things are coming right for me.” One night a man in a green parka came in. He walked on thin, moon-shaped legs and sat in the chair next to mine. He was looking for clues as to the whereabouts of his son, who had crashed his motorcycle right outside nearly three years before. I told him I was a relative stranger, and he held out a photograph. It was his son. They both had the same long face, like the wooden handle of a gun. The police had dismissed the case, he said. His son did not commit suicide, no way. I excused myself. There was too much life hanging around him. I could feel his heavy breath. In the lavatory sink my hands grimaced, slick with liquid soap.
Loss of sexual interest or pleasure?
Not hardly ever.
I
woke up in the back of a stranger’s car, a vast blue sedan with cigarette burns on the dash. Hard to tell what hour it was from my vantage point on the floor, the pale green light held high above the city in the distance as if by a teasing older brother. My neck was all bent and crooked, a hard impression of some car part pressed into the back of it. My whole body was caved in and folded like the thousand facets of a crushed aluminum can. I needed the pills. Nothing any doctor had done could come close: the weight treatment had not worked, neither had the saline injections, medicinal salves, the gyroscope, the boulder toss, submersion in the warm chemical baths. But those pills — not a whole lot I wouldn’t do for those pills, tiny plastic jackets of blue and white, the fine yellow substance inside that glowed like a burning star under black light. Pills that made you feel like an angry, hideous young bull let loose into the fighting ring. Susan would fix me up with a bag, I was sure of it.
I sat up. I had somehow gotten myself all the way out to the bay, which reflected a brilliant array of colored lights that hid its true, rust-colored ugliness. The couple I had followed around the night before had left no traces of ever having been here. Yet there was a conversation that I was sure I could remember snippets of — the woman talking about a doll’s head she used to comb in her backyard, how dirty the spring is with everything smelling like cold semen in the air, and what made a billfold different from a wallet. We met at a nightclub, one I’d come to in search of a hit. I used to go there a lot to pick up different things, but the neighborhood had changed since the last time I’d been there. It had whitened. So instead of the pills, or anything I could really make use of, there were these people. We started talking about sex — the woman told me I was being too uptight. I didn’t even know who she was. I got up to leave, but she took my arm and yanked me back into the booth we were occupying. Her face was nested in the center of a mess of matted, crimped brown hair, floating like a shrunken head. I remember telling her to stay away from my life. I remember that we all decided to take a walk.
Susan was my old girlfriend, and she lived somewhere nearby. It had been a long time since I’d seen her. She was all sorts of different races — shades of black, with splashes of white and something else — the kind of shit no one could get away with anymore. Thirty years ago this kind of breeding was fine — encouraged, even. It had been completely legal to “mix and match” before the Voiding Initiative. She passed, though, fooling the Orange Jackets until the property-wide blood census. That was pretty much the end of our relationship. I am as white as a household appliance, and I was not going to jail over this woman.
My clothes sat heavily on me, bent with sleep. There was a metal kiosk in the distance, shaped like a paper milk carton, with someone official-looking inside, all dressed in orange. I thought I saw him look at me and then go for a phone. Feeling around for my belongings, I picked up a crushed straw cowboy hat — something stupid the woman had put on my head at the nightclub. The man had laughed. “He looks just like that fellow ———.” His inflated grin was too much for me to handle. I only wanted to wear the hat more, placing it on my head like a true rancher.
There was nothing else in the backseat but an empty water bottle and some magazines, so I slid out the door that was farthest away from the guard and crawled over to a set of high green Dumpsters. I heard a voice — “Hey, this is a — Hey, goddamnit, this place is —” It was as halfhearted an attempt as I’d ever heard. From behind the Dumpster I could see him standing outside the kiosk, hand held like a visor against his forehead to block out the powerful floodlights shining from the roof. He looked at his watch, pacing the length of the concrete loading dock. Two truancy robots flew by overhead, ripping open the night with great big searchlights. I was going to have to make it through another day.
As quietly as I could, I hopped the fence and set off on a dirt trail that led through a construction site. Giant, wiry structures, like the bones of a primitive monster, rose up on either side of me, black against the loud green cityscape. There were rows and rows of cranes and backhoes, their sharp, slender appendages hanging desultorily. I might as well have been on another planet.
I hadn’t seen Susan in three years, but I was sure she could hook me up — she always seemed to be surrounded by people in the pharmaceutical business. “I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t just go on taking these pills for the rest of my life,” she had said one night, breaking the long silence we often observed after coupling. “You’re crazy, you actually…,” I said. “You actually — so this is you, from now on?” That is the thing with those pills — you think you’re getting better, when to the rest of the world you are unbearable. It is best to take them in spurts, hurling yourself into a dry period until the world starts to make you sick again. She had been taking them every day for just about as long as I had known her. They flatten everything, making you feel empty and suspended, like a cipher in your own head. She had taken on a sallow, compressed translucence — her body no longer felt like a real thing so much as a wax model. How are you supposed to tell someone that her whole life is based on a stupid lie?