Watch Your Mouth (18 page)

robe opened around me, Stephen’s bare chest, with the hair triangling down like a landing strip, and that scene, over and over, Act I Scene Two, the best sex we ever had, until my orgasm would flower around my spidery hand as I’d seen Stephen’s, around Cyn’s, and I’d stumble out of the steamy bathroom and realize, bing bing bing, I was late for work again. “I—Ideology. Is ideology controlling your life?” I was petrified of rabbis. “S— Social systems. Are social systems controlling your life?” All I had were social systems: converted motels, the painted stripes of parking spaces, boxes of inventory, radio hits, alphabetized overstock, parceled land already leased but not built on. I’d look out into the dark landscape and the constellations of warning lights they put on electric wires, so planes don’t crash, so the perfection of the universe isn’t disrupted here in the town named after the town that led me here, alone, in crisis. I’d mark my place with my fingers, lean back on my windshield and think: Help me.

Help was easy. “There aren’t organized twelve-step programs for absolutely everything,” the book said, “but the twelve steps are blueprints. Use them for an odyssey of recovery,” an odys- sey, I decided, which could counterpoint the
lliad
I had already experienced.
Breaking the SPELL
laid out twelve neat steps like a strip mall: one-stop shopping, bing bing bing. I submitted to the twelve-step universe, perfectly devised, here in surburbia, also perfectly devised.

So far, this has been a book about pain. Now I will describe how I healed myself, how I broke my own SPELL and pulled myself out of CRISIS with the help of a twelve-step program. What next? I’d make next. When you’re stuck in a story, a fa- mous writer of detective fiction once said, have two guys come

through the door with guns. And the funny thing is, that’s ex- actly what happened.

Step 1

One morning, after knocking, two guys came through my door with guns. I looked through my little peephole and saw them: two suburban cops, wired with morning coffee from the new Queequeg Coffee Shop down the highway and the pros- pect of
action
. Outside of the sullen teenagers throwing beer bottles against the dumpsters behind the twelve-screen movie theater, there wasn’t much going down, crimewise. It must have been cool to get the order to open the screen door, watch Santa’s face swing by in a creaky, grinning arc and knock sharply.

“Joseph?” the officer asked, and then he said my last name, which has been changed to protect the innocent.

“Yes,” I said. I had my pants on but not a shirt. They’d in- terrupted me as I stood in the shower, the water off but still dripping, as I’d been stroking myself remembering something I couldn’t quite remember, and I’d thrown pants over my eager object on the way to the door. My heart was pounding from a denied orgasm, and from the arrival of two guys with guns. “Is something wrong?”

“You used to live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the Glass family?”

“Well, I didn’t live with them. For a summer. I stayed with them for a summer.” My carpet was all crabgrass beneath my nervous feet. “What is it?”

The two cops looked at one another like they couldn’t re- member whose line it was. “There’s been a death,” the first one

said, his hand travelling down to his waist toward his gun. My unfired equivalent throbbed briefly, and then I heard what he said and stepped back. I sat on the unmade bed. The cops stepped into my apartment and the one who hadn’t talked yet slammed Santa behind him, a little too hard. They approached me warily and from different angles.

“Who—” I asked, and swallowed. “Who could be dead?”

The quiet one rolled his eyes. The talker looked at me like I knew the answer already. “Simon Glass,” he said.

I’ll pause for a minute while you dig out that old playbill, from that opera you attended a while ago, and check the char- acter list.

The talking cop took my silence for shock, which maybe it was. He took out a small notepad, the kind you could get in pre-wrapped packets of notebooks two stores down from the job I was late for. “Now, your primary relationship was with Cynthia Glass?”

It took me a few seconds: primary, relationship, Cynthia. “Yes. She was my girlfriend.”

“When did you break up?” I blinked.

“Hey,”
the quiet one suddenly snarled, and rapped on the

wall of my apartment. “He asked you a question.
When did you break up with Ann?
”

“Cyn,”
I said.

The talking one looked at us both, and then down at his notebook. “It’s
Cynthia,
” he said tiredly, like
he’d
been the one whose tongue had made her cry out, up in an attic somewhere. “Simon’s sister. Now, Joseph, when did you and Cynthia break up?”

“It’s
Stephen,
” I said. “
Stephen.
How did he—what hap- pened?”

The quiet one pounded on the wall again. “
We’ll
ask the ques- tions, Stephen,” he snapped, and it all became clear to me: It was
Good Cop, Bad Cop,
also the title of a thriller we were push- ing this week at Bindings.

“You’re not Joseph Last Name Changed to Protect the In- nocent?” he asked.

“Yes I am,” I said. “But Cyn’s—
Cynthia’s
—brother’s name

was Stephen.”

Good Cop looked at the notebook. “Yes that’s true,” he said soberly. Bad Cop pounded the wall again, halfheartedly, and looked over at Good. Clearly they wished they could just start over, back at the Santa face.

“He’s dead?” I asked.

“
We’re
asking the questions here,” Bad Cop said. “Now when did you break up with—”

“Cyn’s dead,” I said. My hand, spiderlike, clutched the un- made sheet. It was true.

“When did you break up?”

“Around the end of the summer,” I said. “I guess. She was— she was
killed.
I don’t want to talk about it. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go to work.” You don’t have to read the thriller to know what happened next. What always happens when the suspect tries to brush off the police. Bad Cop shoved me by the shoulders, hard, and I was back down on the saggy mattress.

“I don’t know anything!”
I shouted. I looked at Good Cop for sympathy. “I’m just trying to—leave me alone, please. I just— I want to get away from that whole family.”

“Which is why you moved here to Pittsburg?” Good Cop said skeptically.

I looked down at my bare feet. How in the world did I think I was going to work half-dressed? “It could have been called anything. It just
happened,
” I said, “to be called Pittsburg.”

“That just
happened,
” Good Cop said, “to—”

“It’s a different
spelling.
One letter and everything—”

“And just
happened
to be the place where Simon was work- ing,” Good Cop said. “I’m finding this hard to believe, Stephen.”

“Joseph,”
I said. “Stephen. What happened?” “You’re not making a lot of sense,” Bad Cop said.

“I’m confused,” I said. “I’m in recovery. I’m not even at Step One.”

“Drugs?”

“The Glasses.” The perfect grey of suburban morning was turning my bare feet paler and paler. I was late for work. “Can I get dressed?”

“Just keep your hands where we can see them,” Bad Cop said. Cyn had said something like that to me once. In silence I un- rolled socks, buttoned a shirt, tied a tie.

“Where do you work?” Good Cop asked, his eye on his note- pad. Was he testing me? Was it already written down?

“Bindings,” I said. “New Age.” I took
Breaking the SPELL

from my bedstand and held it up for them. Good and Bad ex- changed a look. They always do. “Where does
Stephen
work?” I asked. “What happened?”

By now I had my keys. Good Cop led the way, then me and then Bad Cop, with Santa bringing up the rear in a dull thud. My fingers were trembling around my keys, so much that I couldn’t lock my door, and with a tired, superior glare, Bad Cop

took the keys from me and finished the job. I think I was being arrested, which was scary but brought a solid, clear calm. I could not go to work. I was sandwiched between two police- men; I could not escape. I knew I had the right to remain silent but I asked it again anyway. “Where does Stephen work?”

Good Cop looked at me like he wished I’d stop pretending to be so dumb, so powerless. But it wasn’t an act: It was the first step. “Right in your backyard,” he said, and pointed at the rising sun.

I took one step out to the railing. I looked out at the land- scape and couldn’t imagine what he was telling me. “What?” I pointed, too, but I couldn’t see anything.
As you can see,
the parking lot said, the strip malls, the cylinder of the lab on top of the hill and the dry sun, rising over Pittsburg and making me late,
as you can see, the universe is perfect.
“What?”

With disgusted patience he grabbed my wrist and moved my arm over until I was pointing at the Morrison Lab, which had been there all along, like an alphabetized book. I had come three thousand miles to live in the shadow of the lab where Stephen worked, and I still couldn’t find it until he helped me. It was the first step, all right:
I admitted I was powerless, and that my life had become unmanageable.

“O.K.,” I said hollowly, one hand clutching my book and the other still pointing at what had been there all along, and I went with them.

Step 2

“There are two things in the world,”
Breaking the SPELL
says simply. “Nothing and semantics.”

“I have to go to work,” I said from my meek and sweaty place in the backseat of the cop car. It was filthy.

“You don’t
have
to go anywhere,” Bad Cop said, “until we say

so.” He had a point. I only had my book. Outside the strip malls descended, as if on freight elevators, as we took the mellow grade up to the Morrison Lab where Stephen worked before he died. The windows of the cop car were grimy and thick, giving Pittsburg a pale pollution, but even when we pulled up to the curb, already littered with cop cars, and Good Cop unlocked the door and primly beckoned me out, the sky still looked filthy. The lobby of the Morrison Lab was evenly split between two costumes: white lab coats and police uniforms. Experts on what went on in the building, and experts on what had gone wrong in it: “Everyone,”
Breaking the SPELL
encourages, “is an expert on
something.
” Everyone was all bunched up in groups, mut- tering; the groups parted for Good Cop, Bad Cop and me like one of us was Moses. It seemed to take forty years to trundle

down the arched hallways to the scene of the crime.

The lab was sputtered in brown. Surprisingly stagey equipment—colored liquids in shapely coed bottles, clear plas- tic tubing, metal boxes pimpled with dials and portholes for electric-green blips, Bunsen burners, mounds of computer printouts, like a mad-scientist opera set—was caked in some- thing brown. The equations on the blackboards were splotched with it, in thick gobs of galaxy formations which extended up two walls. One of the other walls was draped in a big black plastic sheet, like a garbage bag, like everything was garbage. The floor was entirely brown. Even the cops were getting dirty, just from moving around in there, and a small circle of white

lab coats were less white, and more worried, than those in the lobby. The only thing that wasn’t slapped brown was a blank white sheet, draped over something in a corner, something tent- ing the sheet in four places. Something with four limbs.

“Recognize something?” Good Cop said, after I’d taken it all in. I turned to look at his face, slightly brown from the stained light fixtures.

“What?” I asked. “Ask the questions,”
Breaking the SPELL

says, “and you might get the answers.”

“He said,” Bad Cop said,
“recognize something?”

“Well, it looks like a lab.”

Bad Cop spat, and it crackled on the drying brown floor. “You learn that at your fancypants school?”

I thought of Mather and couldn’t think of a thing I’d learned there. “No,” I said. “I just—I don’t recognize anything. I’ve never been here.”

Bad Cop stalked over to the sheet and pulled it back like we were going to bed. “What about
this?
” he shouted, and the wor- ried lab coats looked up and glared at him. “Do you recognize
this
, by any chance?”

Stephen’s mouth was gaping open at an unnatural angle, too wide, and off. Something had pulled his chin down like it was a stuck drawer. Inside it was filled with mud, filled to the teeth. There was a long cat-scratch down his right cheek, red in the brown minstrel show of his face, streaked with tears or water or something. His eyes were either closed or out—there was so much dirt in the sockets I couldn’t see anything. His hands were half-clenched like knobby winter trees, one of them clasping nothing and the other pointing at nothing. For a second I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with his arms, and then I

knew:
everything
. They were folded and refolded like a map in the glove compartment, bent at places that weren’t joints, ac- cordioned in and out like someone had tried to force them to fit somewhere. His legs weren’t bent anywhere but the knee, but the
wrong way
, either that or his whole torso had been wrung out like a rag, it was impossible to tell in all the mud which had hardened along his body in mid-tide. The brown wave tapered down his body like a landing strip, a blossom of crags under his broken neck down to a drained swamp where I assumed his sexual organs were still, somewhere. Stephen was naked except for a small tatter of white—the last of a lab coat, I assume— and the sheet which Bad Cop had flung back from him.

“I
assume,
” he said, in best Bad Cop sarcasm, “that you’ll recognize Simon Glass.”

“Stephen,”
I whispered. Too dirty for even my dirty mind, and too splayed out for the geometrics of the suburbs where it lived, the sight pinned my head to the wall and stuffed it with clay, kept stuffing it even when it fell thrashing to the floor, broke my brain’s arms in a dozen places and left its legs bent the wrong way, all wrong. Everything was all wrong.
Breaking the SPELL
, which I dropped in the mud as I stumbled backward, says this is a common feeling for people in recovery—“remem- ber,” it says, “everything is as likely to be right as it is to be wrong”—but they don’t tell you how it feels. It feels awful. Good Cop caught my arm on my way back, and guided me to an immense lab table that rose like an altar from the floor. I couldn’t sit on it but at least I could lean, my hand leaving a print in the mud tableclothed all over it. “It’s
Stephen,
” I said again. “What happened to him?”