Super Flat Times (17 page)
The construction site gave way to wide, empty streets lined with enormous steel and concrete structures that appeared to levitate in the night, suspended by unseen buttresses. Thin, crescent-shaped skyscrapers balanced on inverted concrete pyramids, as if forever on tiptoe. The sidewalks were canted to ward off the bums. Everything was skinned over in dark reflective glass, as if there weren’t enough reminders around of how ugly we are. Something moved through the sky overhead, lit all over with tiny red lights. I searched in my pockets for a loose cigarette.
I tried to get off the pills several times. I used to check myself into clinics on a regular basis. First, the counselors strap you into a steel apparatus, which rotates on two independent axes. It seems like forever before they’re done attaching the nodes. The head doctor will look at some charts, take measurements, run your blood through the purifier. “We’re going to leave the room for a while,” they’ll say, slipping into lead bibs. “Can I get you anything before we begin?” The whole process takes hours, with cameras all over the place sending invisible rays straight through you and on into the other half of the world. Later they take you into a room with pictures of your body covering the walls, millions of small multicolored cross sections. You begin to understand how comical the body is, how much a caricature of itself, how much work the skin does in holding off this absurdity. Finally, they hand you a vial of dummy pills. These are supposed to simulate the effects of the real ones, but all they do is remind you of all the good times you had before. Pretty soon, you’re out in the night again, shifting cautiously around unfamiliar neighborhoods.
I sensed that I was near Susan’s house. People called this area the Combat Zone. Each corner became increasingly familiar, from the old days. Dark cars slowed up at intersections, their open windows a provocation.
Her place was tall and white, set into a hill with a wide porch and endless spiraling stairs. Not much had changed since I had last been there, except for the cars in the driveway and the unnecessarily cocky addition of a highway yield sign next to the front door, as if to say to the authorities, “Come on, we dare you.”
The doorbell didn’t seem to be working. I saw the shape of someone moving through the frosted glass, and started banging. The form paused, turned either toward the door or away. “Hey,” I called, “I’m looking for Susan. Do you happen to know. . .Does she —”
The form grew, swallowing the dim light emanating from a distant room. I stood back while a series of locks were undone. The man at the door was thin, dark skinned, wearing a loose white T-shirt and large blue jeans, thick hair barely visible beneath a green knit cap. A child, half white and half something else, clutched his leg from behind, peering out into the night at me with wide, dark eyes.
“What the — ?” he said, eyes barely open. Already, I felt stupid and alone.
“I’m looking for Susan. Is she still — ?”
Of course she wasn’t there. Of course he didn’t know what I was talking about. They never knew, one after the next. They never knew.
“Then why is all of that shit in there hers?”
“Hey, why don’t you just —”
“I don’t care what she told you to say. She has some things of mine. Would you —”
The man lifted his hands, palms out, pushing me out into the street in pantomime. “Go, go. Get out of —”
“She knows who I am. We used the same fucking toothbrush so don’t —” The man went behind the door for something. The child followed his arm with her eyes, then looked back at me, something about the intensity of her stare turning me cold with anxiety. “What are you — ?” I said, moving back toward the steps. “Fuck is going on here?” The words came out of my mouth already rehearsed — I nearly choked with their hardness, the brittle, sharp shards of them lodged in me. He closed the door, and as I backed away down the steps I could see a hooked finger part the curtains of her bedroom window slightly.
The woman from the night before had told me I was uptight. I was like a sealed envelope, she said. I let her get away with it because it was true. You think that people only imagine they know you better than you know yourself. It makes you feel as though you’re wearing your life on the outside of your body.
Across the street, catercorner, there was a restaurant that was open, improbably, at whatever hour it had come to be. I took a booth that looked out on the house, laying myself out on the cool orange vinyl bench seat, the most comfortable thing I had felt that night. A waitress came, setting the table with exaggerated indifference. The fluorescent lights burned and flickered, turning everything a crisp yellow. Two old women sat at a booth across from me, staring blankly at each other, each clutching an identical ivory mug. They sat there, mute, in shapeless brown orthopedic shoes, some essential piece of them already dead, I was sure of it.
“Would you like some more time?”
“No, the coffee’s —”
There were two clocks on the wall — one in Northern Time and one in Korean, and only the Korean clock was working: 9:39, it said. I didn’t particularly feel like doing the math.
Susan was one of those people who needed to be walked. If I didn’t walk her, she would kick the sheets off the bed. “Okay, okay,” I’d say each time, reaching for a bathrobe in the darkness, at the small end of an interminable night. The last time I saw her, the night after the census, she was feeling dizzy. “I can’t sleep. I think I need to go somewhere,” she said. “I think I need a doctor.” She knelt on the bed, gripping the mattress, and vomited on the floor. I drove her to the hospital. We saw two police cars pulling into the emergency room entrance ahead of us. “You can just dump me off here. You don’t have to…,” she said, hunched over in the back seat.
“No, I’ll…You just rest.” One of the cops got out to consult with the second squad car.
“No, really, I’ll just get out and —”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She had her hand on the handle, her whole body rigid. What was I supposed to do?
The man opened Susan’s door across the street. The three of them emerged, their heads snapping back and forth, scanning the block. Looking for me, I supposed. Susan held the child on her hip. Where had the child come from? I wondered, standing suddenly, startling the old women from their protracted, mutual reverie.
I made it out the door, stumbling, crashing into a pamphlet rack on my way across the street. Susan and whoever that man was ducked into an old wood-paneled station wagon. “Hey, Jesus —,” I called out, picking up speed. The guy backed out into the road, nearly crashing right into me. Susan was busy in the backseat, strapping the kid into a special chair. Both of them looked at me with crazed, wide eyes, as if they had never seen me before. I knew immediately what had scared me earlier in the night when I’d backed away from the entrance to Susan’s house — the kid’s eyes, I could see right away, even in the darkness, were the same color as mine.
“What?” she said.
“You can’t…you can’t just . . .” Trembling, I was unable to spit out anything resembling a sentence.
“Get out of here.”
“That. . .that? The last time we were together . . .”
It was hard to talk through the windshield. The man, her partner, shook a tight, vein-lined fist at me, cursing. Susan’s eyes watered, and she bent forward in the way that I had received her, crying, on all of those long, dry nights. The scent of her hair came to me then, oddly. A tattoo on the inside of her arm of a flaming, sacred heart.
The car door opened and a foot came out. I bared my teeth at the man, taking a wide, fighting stance. We hovered there for a moment, trembling.
Susan covered her mouth, running her free hand through the child’s hair. The child with her round, golden face — what features of mine had surfaced there, vying for some sort of attention? Having tried so hard for so long not to look at my own sloppy, asymmetrical head, I could barely tell.
“Oh. . .oh, forget about it. Just forget —” I backed away from the car. The man stood his ground until I made it to the sidewalk. They peeled out furiously as I slipped into the shadows cast by the high restaurant walls. First the sound of the car disappeared, and then the sight of it, its glowing red taillights dissolving at the other end of the long, empty avenue.
Sometime after dawn I ran into a man I’d broken a window for once, back before the Voiding Initiative, and he handed me a sandwich bag. “Happy Easter,” he said, because it was April, after all, and each bright capsule contained within, when properly digested, gave me the distinct sensation of rising up out of my body and into the clouds, where I would shine like a sharp, vengeful sword, cutting a silver swath through the heavens.
G
antry sat behind the training facility, hidden from the burning tower exercise by a broad stand of tall yellow weeds, eating the pills his mother had prepared for him, orange pills that tasted like orange drink, the ones that stopped him from doing things like cursing in other languages or petting the faces of strangers. His classmates at the Ministry of Defense Summer Day Camp were suited up in flame-retardant coveralls, strafing the tower with pink chemical gel. “Closer! Get closer!” He could hear the instructor, Colonel Roger, shouting through a heavy cardboard cone. Gantry was pardoned from the more stressful, physically intense group challenges because of his chest, which had been all wrong for as long as he could remember. He didn’t like towatch his peers at work, though. When he watched them, he thought too much about the terrible acts he’d like to perform on them in return for what they did to him on a daily basis, and when he thought about that, he was almost always overcome by dizzying, paralyzing guilt.
The camp was for children who were too smart and resourceful for their own schools, but also for slow children who were bused in from the craggy, burned-out cities in the distance. The idea was that the smart children would lead the slow ones out of the darkness of their ignorance, or at least prepare them for a brief stint in the military. Gantry was there against his will. His mother wanted him to learn to defend himself so that he might one day come home from school without a bandaged head or carrying an IV bag or being in a wheelchair.
He looked at his homework. The first question was “If I have forty acres of forest, how many search dogs will I need to find a fugitive?” He slid the sheet back into his yellow plastic portfolio and sighed deeply.
A bird approached his feet, looking at him sideways, its head a worrisome cloud of nervous activity. It was small and brown, a nutlike handful of a bird, and it was close, closer than any creature had ever come to Gantry, even when he had food in his open palm, even when he was down on all fours, panting, calling the creature by name.
“Chirk chirk?” the bird exclaimed, peering up with one empty, opalescent eye.
Gantry stared back at the bird with a startled, open expression, one that told anyone who might be looking that he was a boy prepared for nothing, a young man on whom any number of people could mount themselves, bury their heels in his soft, shapeless flanks, and thrust away at his life until all that was left was the shredded, musky rind.
“Spare a dime?” the bird asked in a voice that sounded thin and frail, born somewhere else in a flurry of spastic air.
“Beg pardon?” Gantry said.
“Got any change for a wayward sparrow?” the bird asked, retracting one of its slim, scaly legs into the downy mass of feathers covering its bright red breast.
“I don’t have any money,” said Gantry, pulling at his pockets to suggest their emptiness, “and anyway, you’re full of crap. No sparrow’s got red on it.”
The bird’s mouth opened again, wider this time. The lower beak slid back mechanically, and from the resulting hole a tiny human arm protruded, giving Gantry the finger. He looked up and saw Mr. Cushing and Mr. Felt off at the other end of the facility, past the obstacle course, holding a small remote, laughing and cursing. Mr. Cushing was the one who put a bag of fire in Gantry’s locker. Mr. Felt was the one who had called Gantry “cum shovel” and drew the picture of two sheep doing it with a tree trunk on his forehead during Sleep Deprivation Workshop, which was where all of the slow kids were put when the instructors ran out of things for them to do. Gantry had seven Sleep Deprivation sessions today and gym and lunch, which was called a class only if you were slow and had to keep saying things like “this is an apple” while you ate the apple.
And now Gantry was hiding in the weeds, staring at the tiny, bare arm protruding from the bird’s mouth, middle finger proudly erect in the breeze. He always hid in the weeds whenever he could, because that was the only place no one would follow him. Most people at camp followed him because they knew that sooner or later he was going to get worked over, and that was something they liked to see. He could not understand why he’d been singled out. There were uglier children, and slower ones — a few could barely even walk, and yet they were spared. There was no making sense of it. The beatings had gotten worse in the past few weeks. Gantry had to wear a face mask during Biochemical Trauma Reenactment, when the others would hurl things at him, one time even a burning oil drum, the impact of which made Gantry bleed from the ass a little. He hid this from everyone but his mom’s friend Conrad. One night he shuffled into the family room with a clutch of toilet paper, in the center of which bloomed a bright red stain. Conrad, who’d lived in Gantry’s house for nearly a year, hugged him and told him he was honored that Gantry had shared this private moment with him but did not actually mention whether or not such bleeding was indicative of a deeper, hidden wound.
Today the patch of weeds, too, was despoiled.
Gantry had four toys in his portfolio: one was a yellow block that was his mom; one was a brown block that stood for Conrad; a third, big red block that could be a car or a boat; and a small stick that could be a snake or a phone or his father, depending on whether he wanted to think about his father, a person he had never seen, primarily because Gantry was made when his mother’s old girlfriend, Shelf, emptied the contents of an aluminum tub into his mother’s womb. He had seen a picture of the two of them standing on either side of the device, grinning, holding champagne glasses. A piece of colored paper was taped to the front of the machine. It said “Daddy.” The photograph was hidden behind a bit of torn fabric in his mother’s jewelry chest. Gantry had found it the other night while looking for money. He brought it into the living room, where Conrad and his mother were watching a program on elephants. “What is this?” he said, holding the picture out at arm’s length. His mother burst out crying and left the room. Conrad turned to punch one of the oversize throw pillows on the couch. He followed his mother into her bedroom.