I’ve broken the house into quadrants and I’ve drawn these quadrants on 3×5 posterboard and I’ve taped this posterboard to the kitchen wall. There are different colors. The first two weeks were all basement. I went down and cleaned out the boxes and burned the cardboard in the backyard. I got down on my knees and scrubbed the concrete. I scrubbed every cobwebby, grimy corner. I cleaned the exposed pipe in the ceiling. I laid down carpet. I pulled the washer and the dryer away from the wall and got all that crap underneath. I tilted the machines on their sides and cleaned them, too.
When the doorbell rings I am standing in front of the blender. Cleaning. I am wondering whether I should take it apart and scrub its requisite parts. There will most likely be difficult-to-manage and very small pieces of metal. I have steel wool, I have my cleaning agents. Lime-based. Do I need tweezers? The house is sparkling, but what about the inside of objects? You could do surgery on the kitchen table. But could you do surgery inside the washing machine?
Lanie’s at her brother’s. She wants me to go to anger management. Either that or we’re done, she said, and I asked her if she honestly thought me talking to some people in a high school gymnasium about, oh, I don’t know, bayoneting (in the face) the man who jumped on me from the roof of a bungalow in Hyderabad was really going to make the difference. Will that unburden me? I asked. She said: Yes, it might help. You’d be surprised. At least it’s something. I said: You realize that is not a hypothetical example, that’s me drawing from an actual well of actual examples, and the well is full of them, and she said: Yes, I do realize that. That is the problem, Aaron.
But I go on.
The bell rings, I stand in silence, I look at the rectangular buttons, I think, I go to the door. There are two men. One I know, one I don’t. The man I know is named Wesley Chambers. He was my direct commander for my final two jobs at ICS. He’s softer-looking than he actually is. I once saw Wes kick an Indonesian kid in the teeth so hard his neck clearly broke. Crack-crack!
Right now, Wes looks like a well-to-do, manicured lawyer in his civilian clothes. About ten years younger than me, he has a boyish face and an expensive-looking haircut. He’s wearing a black pea coat and underneath I can see a collared shirt and tie. He’s holding a bouquet of very, very ugly flowers.
The other guy I just don’t know.
“Wes,” I say, nodding, holding on to the side of the door. “What can I do for you?”
I look at the flowers.
“Or how can I help those?”
“What’s up, man?” he says, eyes wide, hyperactive. Somewhat menacing, but in a nice way.
“You’re at my house,” I say.
“In the neighborhood,” he says.
“I see.”
“Thought we’d give it one more try.”
“I see.”
“This is Norman.” Wes jerks a thumb at his buddy, then looks past me, into the house. “Lanie home? Can you talk?”
“She’s not home,” I say.
I have never once mentioned Lanie to him, but it’s not a surprise that he’s saying her name like they’re friends.
“You wanna invite us in?” he says. “It’s colder than cold. I know it gets cold in this city but this is the mega for a dude from California.”
He really talks like that.
“Come in,” I say, and step back. “Take your shoes off.”
They don’t complain. I find a vase for the flowers as they take them off, then they follow me into the kitchen. As I cut the stems on the butcher block I ask them if they’d like something to drink. I suggest various lethal chemicals.
Wes, still bright-eyed, says, “I actually don’t drink.” He smiles and points. “You didn’t know that about me, buddy?”
“I didn’t,” I say. I look at the other guy. “You?” I ask.
“I like lemonade.”
“I don’t have any lemonade.”
“No thanks, then,” he says. “Nothing.”
I get a beer for myself and I sit down.
“How’s the time off been?” Wes asks.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“What do you think I want?”
“Do you think I went through all of that just so I can come back?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t. But this happens, you know? I was talking to Chuck”— Chuck’s the founder — “and I was telling him about you. He knows about you, Aaron. You know that? That he’s personally been through your files?”
“No.”
“I told him what you said and how you were done, all of that,” Wes says. “But I was telling him about how good you are. I told him about that village. The way you set fires, in general? Dude. Talent. You have talent, is what I told him. Inborn. I told him we needed you for a lot more things.”
“You don’t.”
“We want you to consider a different position.”
I look at this other guy Wes has with him. Something is wrong. Unlike Wes, he looks like a soldier. His face is a rectangle, he’s got no neck (a very small leathery one, but almost none), and he’s got a scar on his forehead. He doesn’t look like a frat boy, like Wes. He looks more like a gladiator you might run into in a cage underneath the Colosseum. The kind of man who could eat you if you ended up in a life raft together.
“Did you bring Norman to romance me?” I ask, because the way this other guy is staring is doing a number on me. My armpit-hair has begun to collect cold droplets of sweat.
“No,” Wes says.
“What?” I say.
“What, then?”
“Aaron,” Wes says. “Look. We have four new contracts. Shit you wouldn’t believe. Two in Europe. I don’t know if you’ve been reading anything in the papers lately but ignore it if you have. They’re saying one thing and throwing more money at us at the same time. New president? Doesn’t fucking matter. It’s all the same.” The papers say ICS is in trouble — at least it appears to be. Congress is upset about what they are, what they do, where they’ve been. Just a little while ago some journalist found out about their submarines. I’m sure they’ll figure out the field-nuke thing eventually. Long story short, there’s been some public outrage, it’s true, even though I haven’t been paying much attention and I doubt it will come to anything. People want ICS to exist and don’t want to know it’s there. People prefer it to be private. Besides, none of my problems with ICS have to do with what people think of it. My problems have to do with what you end up thinking once you work for them. I am therefore the embodiment of my own problem.
“Come back. Three days. One job. Eighty grand. That’s it. Then you can decide again.” He turns both palms up. “It’ll be like restarting the computer.”
I stand up. “Don’t come to my house anymore, okay? Also, I don’t have a computer.” Lanie took it with her.
Wes looks disappointed. He is mercurial and dangerous and can make his face appear to be whatever he wants it to be. He’s a chimera. I’m sure he’ll therefore be successful in once he quits, too. He’ll be a lawyer or a businessman, whatever. And I do think he’ll quit one of these days. It will get him. It probably already has. There are basically three types who work at ICS: Meatbrains, Pros and Whiners. Meatbrains like to blow shit up, kill people now and then, and have a good reason to use steroids. Pros don’t give a shit one way or the other. They’re like robots. They do the work, they get paid, they do more work, they get paid, etcetera. And third, there are people like me. Whiners. Whiners are the dumbest. We hate ourselves and love it all at the same time. We crack jokes and cry in the woods by ourselves when no one is watching. We’re the ones all the movies are about. The humans. Foolishness. For awhile I thought Wes was just a Pro, but looking at this face, this look of disappointment at my prickliness, practiced and convincing and totally natural here in my kitchen, I think to myself no, closet-Whiner. Pros can’t even fake emotions, which is probably to their credit. Pros don’t really understand what emotions are, or what they’re for. To Pros, emotions are like spleens.
“Alright,” Wes says finally. “But we’ll be around for a couple of days. Call me if you change your mind.”
He stands up, his friend stands up, and magically, we’re a circle of jackasses standing around a table.
“Should we kiss?” I say.
“Two days,” Wes says. “We’ll be here for two days.”
“Just hangin’ around?” I say. “Not a lot going on?”
“We have business in town.”
“Right.”
“Where’s Lanie?” Wes asks. He’s not smiling or chipper now.
“Out,” I say.
“Mm.”
“Justin?”
“Out.”
“Mm.”
He nods to himself, looking across the room at the flowers he brought.
“Make sure she gets those,” he says, pointing. “Those are money flowers.”
“Money flowers?”
“It means fantastic.”
He turns and leaves the kitchen like he’s walking out of my office.
I follow them both, watching the back of Wes’s black jacket as he takes his slow steps. I look at his black socks. The other guy’s got big gray wool ones. Just what a Pro would wear. Wes slips his shoes on standing up, but the other guy has to sit down to pull on his boots. I find it oddly satisfying, watching this badass mercenary robo-warrior dude down there on his ass.
Wes puts his hand on the doorknob. I put my hands in my pockets. The other guy stands up.
“You know what, Aaron?” Wes says.
“What?”
“It’s really, really clean in here.”
Part Two
A couple of times since she left, I’ve gone out by myself to whine in a lonesome, sorrowful, manner, and I like how the snow looks now. After a few minutes I find my boots and my coat and lock up and start walking down the street. The sky’s yellow, the flakes are coming down. There’s a dive bar maybe twenty minutes away, but not long into the walk I start thinking I’m hungry, not thirsty, not really interested in sitting in front of a bottle and staring up at a TV screen for an hour, so I go a different way, crunching along down the sidewalk, hands in my pockets. What I would very much like to have is sushi; I don’t know why, as I’m not a sushi person. I’m all turned around because of Wes and his buddy. Eighty grand is a good year’s salary, not a weekend. Some of the adrenaline is lingering in my stomach. Eighty grand is a cabin in Wisconsin. Or another year or two of not working if I save, if I’m smart. Shit, man: all of college for Justin. His buddy, I am now starting to worry, was from IIS, the intelligence wing. If that’s so then I might as well shoot myself now. I concentrate on the cabin.
There’s a place called Tamaraki. It might not be called that — it’s called something like that. I’ve been to it twice with Lanie. It’s a little unusual for me to be showing up on my own, it seems, but there’s something to the idea of sitting at that well-lit, clean wooden bar, by myself, with all the chefs cutting up the fish, that grabs me.
Then, during this brief fantasy, I catch myself. I don’t care about sushi. I am experiencing instinctual counterintelligence. I’m outsmarting myself on purpose in order to be unpredictable. It makes me even more angry — it’s so unlike me to go to Tamaraki that it’s what I want to do because no one would think to look for me there, and what’s more, some part of my brain thinks it’s a wise idea to keep the reasons secret from myself. I’m brainwashed.
Inside, I wipe the snow from my shoulders and I can see the warmth of the place melting the flakes at the same time. I become transfixed, watching them. My cheeks go red. It smells clean and salty — there are bright lights, just as I’d hoped, and many colors and many people spread across the big, open dining room. There’s a hum of conversation. I think I hear ancient flutes. A few diners from their meals to look at me and I do my best to look like some guy coming in from the snow.
“Can I get you something?” the bartender asks.
“What’s the Japanese beer called, again? The famous one?”
“Sapporo?”
“Yes,” I say. “That.”
“I’ll get you one,” he says, smiling.
“That would be great of you,” I say, “since you’re the bartender.” But who is it that says such hostile things? Me, nexus of anger.
He doesn’t move.
“Big one or small one?” he asks.
“I don’t understand what that means.”
“We have big bottles and small bottles. There are two sizes.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why.”
“It’s just how they come.”
“How big is big?”
“I think they’re twenty-two ounces.”
“I want one big bottle of Sapporo,” I say.
He has remained chipper through this, to his credit. Bartenders — even bartenders at sushi restaurants — tend to handle my need for confrontation better than most. Assholes, I think. It’s because they’re so used to serving assholes. He nods and turns away.
I look to my right. There’s a woman at the bar by herself, looking at me. She looks like she’s 40, maybe just done with work, judging by her outfit. Quick dinner alone. She lives a long ways from beautiful and somewhere in the suburbs of ugly.
“You remind me,” she says, “exactly,” she says, “of someone I know.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
I get the feeling she wants to talk to me, no matter what. She is smiling. I’m not good in situations like this, but tonight, I want to talk to people. I truly do. It probably won’t work, but I do. When it comes to strangers, I’m like a golem trying to handle puppies. I have incredible strength in my hands and forearms and tend to accidentally crush their internal organs while trying to pet them. Then I walk around crying with their little bodies in my arms, lamenting the classical ironies. Yet now, it feels as though a better, deeper part of myself is urging me forward. Just talk. Just let words go into their heads and let theirs come into yours, Aaron, it’s simple, just note it. Not all of me is self-destructive. Part of me is trying to save me. Part of me likes me. If you sit in your house all day imagining all the ways you’re not in the right kingdom anymore, maybe, instead of staring at the wall, you should talk to people and go back into the right kingdom? There are such things as gates and underground passageways, aren’t there? Have new routes vanished in my absence? What is the secret word? Or is the central gate still open? I have no idea.
“I have no idea,” I say.
“In terms of sushi?”
She helps me with the menu and suggests a few things to order, and I order, and we talk about all the problems with the CTA and then also discuss clouds. Her name is Katherine or probably Karen. She’s a mother but divorced. She’s a lawyer. She asks me what I do and I tell her security guard instead of International Conflict Solutions Consultant or murderer. We move on and talk about various types of fish you can eat. We discuss salmon for eons. She says she likes coming here because she can smoke and no one seems to give her the stink eye. When she says that the bartender comes by and tells us that all Japanese men like to smoke. Categorically. He says that sometimes there’s a convention in town and the whole place is full of Japanese men eating pounds and pounds of sushi, drinking sake, and smoking. They have to be smoking, even as they slide rolls into their mouths. I look around after he says it. There are maybe a dozen suburban white people in here and no Japanese people at all. When I look back he says, “We usually have at least one.”
I drink quite a lot. This Katarina person then tells me that her husband used to be a big boat-guy, a real boat-captain, and that it turned out the boat was an excuse to cheat on her. He did sincerely love boating, she says, but it was also an excuse. She makes it a point to note the ambiguity, which, in a moment of clarity, I find endearing. She tells me that, in a way, she always knew. She tells me about a dream she had about her husband asking her if it was okay for the boat to sleep with them in the bed. That was one piece of evidence. She tells me about another dream where she was water-skiing behind the boat and it suddenly evacuated its bowels and she water-skied directly into an enormous, floating boat-turd. I eat so much and become so drunk and so full of fish that I myself stop being able to either speak or understand what she’s saying. I’m not sure if she even eats — it seems impossible. She is the kind of person who maybe notices her monopoly on the conversation this but keeps talking anyway — not because she talks too much, but because she wants to make sure there’s always a line from one person to the other. Underground passageways. Above-ground? Like if she went mute for a second, both of our brains could and probably would seize up. I can imagine some other moment with her — more intimate, less manic, just the two of us, and actually in a different dimension where I’m not married to Lanie — when I am the one talking and she is the one listening.
About twenty minutes after I’ve paid she says, “Well,” and smiles. “This has been so nice. Aaron, right?”
I nod. I come close to telling her that I’m prone to seeing skeletons when I stare at people too long. I hold back. Obviously, though, I feel safe.
She says, “Can we — would you like to go out some time? For dinner?”
She blushes, rolls her eyes at herself. The way she says it — the way she smiles, maybe — I can see that she is a deeply kind, thoughtful person. I don’t know how I can tell, exactly, but it’s a wonderful vision — she actually is definitively kind. There can be no doubt. Not only that, but I can perceive it. I can see that she is somehow afraid, now, as she looks for the right words, that she will either hurt me or hurt herself by asking a strange man on a date.
I put both hands on the bar. “I think that I should—”
“Yes, no,” she says. “Of course.”
“It’s not that, Karla,” I say. “I’m married.”
“Oh!” she says, honestly surprised. She squints at my hand. “Where’s your ring?”
“It’s being cleaned.”
She laughs at that, like I’m telling her something secret about marriage, but actually, my ring really is at this moment sitting in a jar of hydrochloric acid out in the garage.
“I had a good time, too,” she says. I don’t really get it, but we hug.
On the walk home, Wes’s Suburban drives right by. I dive into some bushes way too late, but Wes keeps driving. After it’s gone and has disappeared around the corner, I stand, brush myself off, and give a little salute.
Part Three
I decide to go to Anger Management the next evening — the address and the time are there on the fridge, in Lanie’s writing. Her last communiqué to me. I spend the whole day on the kitchen. The sink is a silent, quiet culprit (and don’t forget the bacterial hotbed of the drain), and I scrub for so long that by the time I’m done, I’m looking at an entirely new layer of metal. Then I use silver polish on it, then scrub it again. I realize I can still see scratches and so I go to the hardware store, buy a finer grit of steel wool, and go at the whole thing again, this time with more patience. I try to be calm and not press down so hard. More than once I go out to the living room and stand behind the curtains and watch the street through the crack. Today there’s no sign of them. I mark all the times I think about Wes’s offer by drawing vertical lines on the bottom of my cleaning schedule. By two o’clock, I’ve thought about rejoining ICS nine times. Europe. There could be plenty to do in Europe. I could potentially assassinate a real king, which would be like unexpectedly and out-of-nowhere getting the hardest item on your scavenger-hunt list. I imagine the cabin, too, and all the safety there. Not because of weapons. We wouldn’t have a moat. I think of it as simple, but containing nice electronic features. Sort of a hybrid place, sort of techno-pastoral, sort of out there in-between everything. Very fine linens and a permanent fresh scent.
I decide to call Lanie. I decide it will be interesting to do it while I’m sitting on the back porch, naked.
“That’s how you make kids who don’t, like, talk,” she says to me, when we get on to the issue of me locking Justin in the closet. Justin is Lanie’s son from an old boyfriend. I shouldn’t say it like that, though; he’s my stepson. He has been for some time. He has never been too impressed by me, no matter how hard I’ve tried. That’s fine, the kid can do what he wants, he doesn’t have to like me, but it’s frustrating, not getting respect. Especially if you’re like me, and on the edge of hysteria.
The closet incident is what put Lanie over the edge. She was out with some friends. Justin and I were home. I told him to do his dishes. He kicked the TV screen and busted it and I snapped on him and locked him up with the coats. I left him in there for two hours, until Lanie came home. This kid is nine.
“You can be monstrous.”
“I agree.”
“It scares me. It has nothing to do with whether or not I love you.”
“I’m not a monster,” I say. “I know. I lost it.”
“That was something a monster would do.”
“I know,” I say. I’m shivering. I look down and hope, distractedly, that my penis is not frozen to the chair. I don’t think it is. I lift it, just in case. “I have a problem,” I continue. “It wasn’t the right thing to do. I’m going tonight.”
“To anger management?”
“Yes.”
She’s silent for a few seconds, mulling. Finally, she says, “I have to admit, I’m surprised.”
“Things are getting…” I look at the frozen, gray birdbath and realize, in a moment of awful deflation, that the “dream” I had last night was not actually a dream. I can see the hole I dug in the snow. I can see the fresh dirt I tore up. It’s real. I look at my fingernails and see the dirt in them, too. So. Basically, in this dream, it was night, and I went into the backyard and buried a landmine beside the birdbath.
“Things are getting what?”
“Weird. Blurred.”
“Shouldn’t I feel,” she says, “this big desire to come back when you’re all apologetic and you need me? I mean if I’m going to come back? Shouldn’t my heart be welling up right now?”
“I don’t know, baby. I have no idea what you’re supposed to feel.”
“That would be the difference between me leaving as a wakeup call to you and me leaving, like leaving.”
“Maybe, yes.”
“It seems like I should just know it’s the right thing to do.”
“I take it you don’t.”
“You’re dangerous,” she says. “What do I do with that? My husband is dangerous?”
“I’m not dangerous,” I say.
“I just keep thinking about what you were like when you were fourteen,” she says. “Can you even believe it? If you think about that? We used to be so young. We were babies when we first met.”
“I know.” Surprisingly, it makes me sad, even though everyone used to be so young, and I usually don’t go in for thinking like this.
“Go to class,” she says. “Just call tomorrow. Tell me if it helps.”
“It’s not a class. It’s a group.”
“It’s a class. You’re learning something.”
“Can I come over tomorrow? After? I’ll apologize to Justin. I need to do that.”
“My brother,” she says, “is too pissed. Maybe next week.”
“Your brother is always too pissed.”
“Just when you’re around,” she says. “Or when we’re playing board games.”
“I told him I was sorry about the Monopoly incident.”
“I don’t think it really got through. Maybe because you were screaming it at him.”
By the time we’re done talking we’ve gotten back to something we do, some back and forth that doesn’t really have any content to it, just the baseline of two people who know each other well trading the bottom things in their minds. I find it to be very normal. It’s often warm. I am fucking blue and shivering by the time I go inside.
I take a hot shower and get dressed.
I find an envelope under the door.
Inside the envelope there’s a note.
The note says: “You drive a hard bargain, bro! Great news! Chuck gave thumbs up on 120K! I’ll stop by later! Aaron: You want to be on this side of the fence, okay? Trust me!”
On the bottom, a postscript: “I had Norm pull out that landmine, FYI. Careful, kid!”
* * *
The beginning of the meeting isn’t so bad. It’s pretty much like you’d expect. We’re not in a high school gym; we’re in a church. There’s coffee. There are nine people here. Our leader is a therapist named Dr. Billy. Dr. Billy is about fifty. He’s got a big biker beard and he’s stuffed into a brown suit from 1973. He explains that he’s just come from a conference in Canada. He uses his hands to illustrate his abstract points and then, out of nowhere, ten minutes into the meeting, I look up and see that he’s eating a massive hot Italian beef sandwich.
He’s got a smooth, ultra-controlled voice and he talks about how anger really isn’t an emotion like the others, it’s more like the body’s admonition of confusion. I have a nine-inch serrated blade concealed in a sheath on my right calf.
After the break, a sleepy-looking woman named Jill a few seats to the right of me asks if she can say a few words about her week, and Dr. Billy gives her the floor.
She says, “First, I’d like to welcome Aaron,” she nods at me. Everyone nods at me and I nod back. Mumbled hellos. “Aaron, I just want you to know that most of us have been coming here for awhile now. It might look like it’s not gonna do anything for you. But stick with it. You look so skeptical right now.” She smiles. “Try to let go of that.”
“I’m not skeptical,” I say. “This is just my face.”
“Okay,” she said. “But I wanted to say it anyway.”
“Alright,” I say. “Thanks, Jill.”
She explains that this week, her boss brought her into the office and criticized her for three typos on an outgoing email to a client. Jill explains that a co-worker added a few lines to the email before it went out, and that the typos were all in the addition. She never got a chance to re-proof it. But her boss wouldn’t let her speak before he was finished accosting her. She saw it happening and stayed calm. She let him talk, then she told him, calmly, that she hadn’t made the mistake. He pretended that it didn’t matter and found a way to blame her anyway. Something about how she was the final editorial eye, so all mistakes were her mistakes.
People nod. People in the group go, “Hmmm.”
Jill says, then, that this is usually her trigger — when being reasonable isn’t enough to get in the way of somebody’s drive toward a different goal. Part of me awakens at this characterization. But she smiles then and says that because of group, she recognized it in the moment. She saw it for what it was and because of that, she didn’t do anything. She says she got a little mad, but did nothing.
“I used what I learned,” she says proudly.
Everyone claps.
Dr. Billy thanks her and then asks me if I want to say anything.
I say, “My trigger is everything in the universe.”
Everyone laughs.
I stare back at them, one by one. I hate it when I make people laugh. It’s unintentional. I don’t joke. To clear this up, I stare at Dr. Billy for a long time. Yes, like a threat.
“I know we sometimes feel that way,” says Dr. Billy, after absorbing my look with his fat face. “Of course. But part of the exercise is to hone it down and get more specific.”
“No,” I say. “I’m being specific when I say that. Everything that exists, now, makes me angry. All. I don’t know any other way to say it. All.” I nod the last time I say “all”; I’m getting somewhere.
“Hm,” says Dr. Billy. “In what way?”
“Nobody, anywhere, has any real sense what is actually going on.” This doesn’t seem to get a very good reaction from the crowd — no doubt I’m scowling as I say it, but still. I continue: “I don’t either, but at least I know I don’t. I’m sorry but you people aren’t like me.” This is me trying to take the edge off. Being friendly. “You haven’t done the shit I’ve done.”
“What do you mean by ‘going on’?” Billy asks. He does air quotes. “Could you elaborate on that point?”
I have choices here. I could explain to him, for example, that most people, when they wake up in the morning, they don’t think about, say, laws and things like that, but they probably feel that those things are there somewhere, all these agreements people have made with one another, in the background of life. Furthermore they probably feel that they are solid, even though they’re invisible. And beyond laws, there are other standard powers we acknowledge as part of your human realm: Love, for example. Kinship. Good. Family. Truth. Meaning. I could explain to him that those things are like warm, bending taffy to me, and how actually, something would be wrong with me if they weren’t like warm, bending taffy. There is no underlying structure. We live in chaos. So maybe for other people, something happens and that’s their trigger. But for me, just walking around and being alive in chaos is mine.
I say, “I find myself getting particularly agitated at movie theatres.”
“Why, do you think?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Most endings are disappointing.”
“I think there might be more there,” Billy says. “Maybe it’s stories themselves. The way they often try to present a definitive truth? Maybe it’s narrative you’re rejecting.”
“Your goobledeegob mumbo-jumbo makes no sense, Dr. Billy,” I say.
“I’ve heard that before, son,” Dr. Billy says, smiling kindly. “But is that me? Or is that both of us?”
* * *
After the meeting, I don’t go to see Lanie and Justin. I just walk straight west. I’m looking for a neighborhood that makes me uncomfortable so I can clear my head. Lawndale might be nice. I need to walk around in a place where I might possibly die a violent death.
Things look safe for about a half-hour, but after another mile, I’m further west, on an empty street, and my skin comes alive. It’s an industrial area, and I’ve never been here. There is slush and snow everywhere. The streets are empty and there is a gloom wafting from the dilapidated buildings, windows sadly alight with residents who’ve most likely been put where they are by somebody else. I keep going, past an empty warehouse, past a lot, past a 7-11. Through the window I see the lone attendant behind a wall of bulletproof glass, leaning on the counter within his small protective cube, smoking, watching television. I push on. The street again darkens. I come to more houses and an apartment complex. This is excellent ghetto, here. No clichés, but danger in the air. Another block and there’s a group of teenagers on the corner. I wouldn’t call them life-threatening, but they might do; I walk by them and stare with very buggy eyes.
A kid with a huge kicked Bulls hat sees me, watches me, and says, “The fuck you lookin’ at, faggot?” and I say nothing but feel adrenaline, joy, other things. I look away, don’t respond. I feel them peel away from their corner, begin to follow me. I smile to myself and don’t look back. Then I find myself laughing out loud, but accidentally. It’s a foreign, high-pitched giggle and it frightens me. I try to think of a dance I can do, but while walking. I try something with rolling my head back and forth and I continue laughing. I hear someone say, “You escape from the loony bin, dude?” and another say, “Motherfucker must be crazy.” They all laugh. Perhaps they’re reacting to my twitches and feints? I keep going. They are children, that they are no older than 16. They’re just kids making fun of the strange person and I am here because I am bloodthirsty. The most subterranean of my imaginations is hypothesizing about good kill shots with the blade. A wild and horrendous part of me is straining against its bonds in anticipation of multiple liquidations. In the outside world, the same voice says something else and they all start to laugh harder. I missed it. I feel glad they have me to laugh at. Feeling glad makes me think, too, that I’m not Satan, I’m just all bound up inside. This makes me doubly glad.
I go one block, turn right, walk a block, turn right again, and walk all the way back to my car.
I drive home.
I don’t see Wes’s suburban on the street. I park a few blocks away and cut through the backyards and climb the side of the house and break in through my own bathroom window. At first I sleep in the closet, holding an assault rifle, but in the middle of the night, in the middle of the darkness, I wake up, still feeling a little glad, leave the rifle, go to the bedroom, get into my pajamas, and go to bed like a normal person.
Part Four
The morning is crisp, raw, and cloudless. There’s no sign of Wes. I decide not to clean. Instead I will go to see Lanie and ask her to come home and also tell her that if she doesn’t, I’ll be leaving again, only possibly forever, down into the pit of ambient metaphysical chaos. I take no weapons.
I knew her in junior high. We didn’t go out then, but we were friendly. We used to live near one another, and sometimes I’d see her playing basketball with her brother. Sometimes I’d play. She met her first man, Justin’s dad, at college, but by the time she was back in town she was on her own again and she just had the kid with her. I saw her once or twice — I’d stayed in town for school — and then one day I went to war. When I came back, she was still there.
One night we ran into one another at a bar, talked, and that was that. She said, “Your hair is so weird,” and I said, “Your hair is weird, too,” even though it was exactly the same as it had been. Mine was longer. I was doing everything I could to distance myself from where I’d just come from. But these things…there are pushes and pulls. ICS sent a mailer, I filled it out. ICS called, ICS offered, I joined.
I don’t want to go to Europe, I know that, but truth be told, the skeleton thing is real. Sometimes it’s only lightly in the background, but some days I’ll be walking around in Home Depot and every single person will literally appear to be a white grinning skeleton to me. No flesh. Is this a hallucination? Can the absence of something be a hallucination? I once had a ten-minute conversation about bathroom tiles with a skeleton wearing a bright orange vest. One might say that this is fairly clear evidence of malfunction. But that’s not true, either. I recognize metaphor. Hallucination can be thought of as metaphor. Dr. Billy knew. Some guy in some gym eating an Italian Beef. He could see the truth. I mean they really actually all do look like fucking skeletons, but I see what my mind if doing to me.
I decide it’s a good idea to show up at Lanie’s brother’s with flowers, and so I drive first to the flower shop on Sheffield. Inside, there’s a guy with little Charles Dickens spectacles reading the newspaper. He looks up and nods and I tell him that I need something beautiful.
“Okay,” he says. “They are flowers. Let’s both relax.”
“I don’t know if I know how to say this right,” I say, “but I want something that has no meaning.”
“You’ll have to explain.”
“I don’t want a bunch of flowers that have special meaning.”
“Ah.”
“They say a red rose is this, a white rose is that.”
“White rose means happy love.”
“Well fuck that.”
“Really?”
“No,” I say, “not really. Ignore me if I say things quickly.”
“Because happy love is not something you can just—”
“There must be flowers that are just flowers.”
“Okay,” he says. “I see what you’re saying. I understand. Interesting.”
“Good.” I’m relieved that he understands, exhausted by the attempt at communicating. “Good,” I say again.
He comes out from behind the counter, animated by the challenge. Together we go to the cooler against the wall. “Last week I had a local pizza-delivery man in here asking for a flower representing the ability to teleport.”
“Just straight-up beautiful,” I say. “But also simple.”
“I heard you,” he says, swatting the air in my direction. He’s getting irritated now, which is bad, because I get irritated when I’m with someone who’s irritated, and I don’t want to be irritated. “Don’t keep saying the same thing. It makes you seem like a nutjob.” Still looking into his coolers, he places a finger on his lips and deliberates. “We’re going to start wild,” he says, “and go from there.”
I step aside and let him do his thing. A new calm comes over me as I watch him experiment with arrangements, maybe something to do with his matter-of-factness, something to do with believing, as I watch, that there truly is a skill to flower-arrangement, and that this man has a palpable and demonstrable talent that is not related to harm. He chats with me. How nice. As he is gathering the ingredients I stare at the metal handle of one of the coolers and take deep breaths, groping at the possibilities implied by such an idea. I turn and start to watch people passing on the sidewalk outside. I try to think of what they do at home at night, or what skills they utilize at work. I see, I’m pretty sure, Wes’s Suburban go by, and about a minute later, just as the flower-man is asking if I like what he’s assembled, if I like the bubbly purple nubs, and I, eyes glazed, am staring dumbly into the multitude of pleasing colors, the chime rings, and Wes’s pal Norman, the IIS guy with the wool socks, comes into the store and starts looking at ferns.
“It’s good,” I say, taking the bouquet. I hold onto the bouquet very carefully as we go to the cash register. As he rings me up, I look back at the ferns. Norman is there for a moment, but as I watch him, he presses something on his watch, shimmers, becomes translucent, melts into the foliage, and I can’t see him anymore.
“Twenty-five dollars.”
I pay. To get to the door, I press my back against the wall opposite the ferns. Once outside, I run to my car. When I start the engine, I look up at the mirror and see that Norman is sitting in the back seat. He has a can of lemon soda.
“You’ll have to stay with us,” he says. “I know you don’t believe me, friend, but everyone goes through this. You’re one of the better ones. So we got an expense account.”
“Please,” I say, very calmly, “exit my vehicle, sir.”
“I don’t understand why you need the flowers,” Norman says. “We brought you flowers.”
“I needed more flowers,” I say.
Norman opens the door. “What’s incredible is that we probably don’t have to convince you,” he says. “Right?”
“Please, sir,” I say. “Exit my vehicle.”
I actually studied things. I went to college and read Plato and Aristotle. I wrote a long, decent paper on Anaximander. I’m not saying that that necessarily makes me a Whiner automatically, this liberal arts education of mine, or that it makes me special, but I am saying that once in awhile, skeletons and all, weapons attached to discreet parts my body or not, the taste of blood on my lips or not on my lips, I realize it’s wise to remember who you used to be. Or, like Lanie says, recall being fourteen years old. People come from somewhere. Wes, I don’t doubt, had a mother who treated him very well, and as I drive, flowers in my free hand like a chalice, feeling wise but also afraid, yes, I imagine him. I imagine that he was on a soccer team once. Wes scores a goal.
There’s no sign of the Suburban as I turn onto Lanie’s brother’s block. I am clear and lucid. Fuck them. Wes, Norman, Chuck. The other ten-thousand, too. I am going to take my flowers and repair the damage and make it clear that getting turned around is something that happens over the course of time. Even the act of being turned around implies that it can be reversed. Nothing is stuck. I have to believe that. You are never trapped. Say it to yourself, Aaron, over and over again. Say it as you drive with flowers. Say it and also say Lanie, my baby, come back to me, I love you.
“Lanie’s not here,” her brother tells me, deep concern on his face, “if that’s what you’re trying to say, Aaron.”
I’m apparently standing at Lanie’s brother’s door.
“Are you sleepwalking? Are you fucking high?”
“No.”
He looks at the flowers, then back at me. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Where is she?”
“Let me ask my question first,” he says patiently, nodding to acknowledge what I said. “It’ll be quick.”
“Please, Greg. I’m trying.”
“What goes through someone’s mind as he’s, I don’t know, kicking out the taillights in his brother-in-law’s car over a real-estate dispute in the game of Monopoly? Because I’ve been wondering for awhile. Ever since…”
He trails off, looking up toward the sky, lips pursed with extreme irony.
“Oh, I’m not sure.”
“I apologize,” I say. “Again.”
“This is the first apology.”
“I apologize, then.”
“Of course you apologize now. How about back then? Or how about not doing it at all?”
“I’m begging you.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
I stare at him. It could be, I realize, that this, really, is my trigger. Whenever anyone asks me why. Why are there incidents? Why are you so angry? I can’t even conceive of an answer. I can mumble about reality, but that’s no answer. All I would like is to be able to produce an answer.
I try one.
“I just want somebody,” I say, “to understand what I’ve done.”
Greg is a deep, calm guy. He’s a teacher. I’m afraid of him for all of these reasons. He stands there, arms crossed, thinking about it. He’s guessing that he’ll never be able to understand what I’ve done, and he’s wondering about whether his sister will be able to, and probably doubting it. Of course he’s right to worry about the future and wonder what will come of all this. Behind him I see his little daughter run down the hall, screaming happily, dragging a blanket behind her. I catch a glimpse of Justin, too, all the way back in the kitchen. He’s at the table, eating cereal. He’s not looking our way. Greg’s little girl runs around and keeps screaming. Greg doesn’t even flinch. Instead he adjusts his glasses and says, “She went back to your house.”
“Thank you.”
“I urged her to divorce you.”
“I understand.”
“She still might.”
“That’s okay. She probably should. I would if I were her.”
“So would I,” Greg says. “Lucky she’s her.”
I turn to go.
“Aaron,” he says.
I turn back.
“The flowers are pretty.”
Part Five
Wes’s Suburban is parked in my driveway when I get home.
When I run into the kitchen, he looks up, bright-eyed, and says, “Hey, man! I already got the flowers, remember? Norman told me what a cornball you were being.”
Lanie is there at the kitchen table with them. I am prepared to go berserk if I have to. There are four grenades stashed in the over and I could be to them in roughly four seconds. The Uzi is up behind the pots and pans. I could turn this house into a fucking inferno. I could destroy everything. All of us. If that’s what Wes wants, that’s what I’ll give him.
I wait for a hint.
She does not seem to have been tortured. In fact, she smiles at me, then gives me a little wave from the table.
Norman nods at me, holds up a glass of yellow liquid.
“Your own urine?” I say.
He says, “It turns out you did have lemonade. You didn’t look hard enough. It was behind the milk.”
“Leave,” I say to them. “Get out.”
“We were just getting to know—”
“Get out.” It would be impossible to describe to you just how much I want to scream it. But I’m not going to. You can’t scream your way through these people. You can’t be angry. If you are you’ll be stuck.
Lanie, thankfully, looks like she doesn’t care one way or the other. Later, as she’s pulling Wes’s flowers from the vase and replacing them with mine, she will tell me that Wes came in and started telling her some rather sensitive things, work-wise. It will make sense to me. That’s the last card to play if you’re in Wes’s position — Chuck at his throat, a world of shit all around him, orders to pull people back into it because no one, really, wants to be doing it at all.Yes, Wes, I can see you. You told the woman I love about the horrible things I have done. She listened and absorbed it. Contrary to your plans and expectations, she did not cease to love me, because you’ve failed to understand something crucial, and I was not made into the nihilist you needed me to be to get me back. Don’t you see that since I’ve been back, since she’s been gone, all I’ve wanted to do is confess? Wes? To lie down in her lap, cry, and tell her about the evil I’ve personally added to the world? Wes: do you see how you helped me? Thank you.
“It’s time to get out of my house,” I say again.
Now I point to the door with the flowers, which are somehow in my hand. Lanie is looking at me. Is she proud? Wes’s skeleton looks saddened. Norman’s looks old and bulky and worn, like it has carried too much weight for too long, committed too many atrocities, even for a Pro. Yes, Norman, I can see you as well. I hope there’s a limit to the havoc one human frame can wreak during a lifetime, for your sake. The skull of Norman has long scratches and one bigger crack down the side. Was he once hit in the head with a hammer?
Lanie’s skeleton is small and elegant. I can see her bad posture clearly. I can see the miniature architecture of rib and vertebrae and shoulder. I can see the interlocking of bones in my own wrist and hand as I continue to point at the door. I can see the flowers have no skeleton, and remain flowers. They have chlorophyll. I can see we are motionless in this death-frieze for some time.
Then Wes’s skeleton stands up, and Norman’s does, too, and I follow them both to the door.
“Apparently you don’t want to work for us anymore,” Wes says cheerfully. Norman is down on the ground, putting on his shoes again. “You win!”
“Go.”
“Twenty years from now, Aaron,” he says. “Twenty years from now you’ll think of this moment.”
I don’t respond to that. Then there are skeletons walking through the snow, adorned in winter clothing, lords of doom, those privy to the lifting of the veil, and this is the end of this day. I’m not healed, nor are they vanquished.
I retreat to the kitchen.
Lanie’s at the sink, cleaning Norman’s lemonade glass. Did she see any of it? The hidden world?
When she turns and sees me in the doorway with the flowers, she says, “Those are great. It’s really clean in here.” I help her finish in the kitchen and then take her down into the basement to show her what work I’ve done since she’s been gone. I show her the new carpet.
She says, “I’m not necessarily back. I came to have coffee. We should talk it through, Aaron. We need to talk.”
I say, “That’s fine. That’s good.”
I can see the skin taut on her cheekbone. I can see the two freckles below her temple. I can see her earlobe and the empty holes of her old and angry teenage piercings. Nothing’s there now. Her skin still shines youth. I know this person well, I think. And what’s more, I’ve known her well for quite some time, and she is the lost years and the days.
