So much noise buffeting around in here I can’t make sense of it. I focus on the crackling paper of my cigarette. Through all the rest I can still hear that, but to call it focus is a little disingenuous. That word means less and less these days. The best we can do is pantomime focus. Stare at something analog for three minutes—a book, a river, a melting popsicle—and treat it like exercise, like morning calisthenics. Even this train of thought right here was doomed before it left the station.
I don’t know who brought this bottle of Hpnotiq but it’s making Marcy sick. The glitter in there can’t be good for anyone. Microplastics supposedly riddle our bodies, flow from our piss and form a cast over our brains. Dissect us and we’re lifesized action figures, dormant until synched to a Device, an animating electronic. Her watery eyes flash over to the sink, but it doesn’t appear Clark has done the dishes for a dog’s life and, even in her state, she’s civilized enough to know you cannot, under any circumstance, projectile vomit all over someone’s dishes, dirty or not, unless you plan to replace them, not wash but replace.
How do I focus? Took Simone to the Milwaukee museum last year, not expecting to recognize so many names. Kandinsky and Picasso. Miró and Rodin. “Rodin. Rodin,” she said. “He’s big, right? Where do I know that name from?” It was a great tendriled head of bronze under a glass cube. He did The Thinker, I said. The pose we all unconsciously invoke when pantomiming focus. Say, for example, while we wander memorialized halls paid for by a generation who didn’t have to pantomime, who were still hardwired to enjoy things immersively. [Grim aside: is enjoyment itself becoming a nostalgic practice, like basket-weaving or glass-blowing, replaced in furtive but efficient phases by humming, hyperactive numbness, i.e. enjoyment’s exciting hologram?]
Even in the unlikely event of Clark’s dishes being stacked away, glistening clean, inside the laminate cupboards, who the hell opts for the sink over the garbage can? Only a savage. Except the garbage can is overflowing with sheetrock, of all things, from an interminable ceiling renovation, so that’s not an option either. I pick up the heavy frosted-glass bottle of Hpnotiq and inspect the label. Bottled in France. A mixture of fruit juice, vodka, cognac. Why do I feel the French are waging a cold war on us by exporting this shit? Waste runoff. The dregs of finer distillations. They know full well it’ll draw the eye of a very specific brand of American goddess.
In the end Clark’s philodendron never stood a chance, the terra cotta pot reduced to a toilet bowl as Marcy kneels before it, shoulders bucking, like some pantheistic jungle queen. Her boyfriend, Leon, confused in the middle of sparking a bowl, springs from his chair and bolts over to do boyfriend things, hair holding, back rubbing, whispering sweet nothings, assuring her it’s not the catastrophe that it is. Thank god Clark allows smoking in here and leads by example. It helps mask the smell.
“Who brought this?” I demand, brandishing the Hpnotiq. “Who was sick enough to bring this?”
“Marcy did.”
My pity extinguished. So she did it to herself. Then again, what’s to be expected? I’ve been fostering the illusion that it’s somewhere between midnight and two, an illusion shattered when I walk outside for a breath of fresh air and am nearly assassinated by a hurled newspaper, a whistling shuriken in a plastic sleeve. The paperboy cycles past. According to my phone it’s half-past-four and I missed a call from Simone thirty-five minutes ago. Since that time, I know relief has washed over her, that she’s taken it as “a sign from the universe,” as people trying to shake their religious upbringings like to say. But a sign of what? That we’re horrible for each other? That she’s too good for me? Sometimes I agree with both of these. Sometimes just one or the other.
We played a game where we would sit in the corner of the bar and guess what kind of serial killer everyone was, their modus operandi, their kinks and calling cards, whether they were home invaders or dungeon masters or transients on the go, dumping bodies along the wayside. I’ll never forget an episode of such perverse synchronicity that it bordered on manifestation. An Ed Gein type walked in, not a spitting image but more like a Mall-Santa facsimile, which wasn’t a strange thing in itself because Ed Gein, lugubrious mama’s boy that he was, self-effacing and dressed like Elmer Fudd, might well have been the Wisconsin male archetype. This fella though, this impersonator, didn’t have the Droopy Dog eyes or the lopsided placidity of Gein. Instead he shone with an almost vampiric electricity. The very stubble on his face fluttered ultraviolet. His nostrils were dry, flaky around the flanges from too much blowing with coarse tissue. He wore a puffy gray vest over yellow flannel. The collar of this flannel stuck out to me as impossibly mangled, crinkled, shapeless. Out of it rose a chicken-skin throat, an undulating adam’s apple, as if he’d just swallowed a large rat that hadn’t yet tapped out. The bar was packed, no one paid him any attention, but he beamed at us all like we were his friends, or destined to be, with cat’s eyes yellow-green and teeth weaned on cannibalism. If not for Simone I might’ve thought I alone could see him, that I was sensitive to a race of duck-booted incubi roving among us. He ordered something. To my suggestible memory it was a bloody mary, but I know that’s the Mandela Effect at work, because Simone and I, we turned to each other at the exact same moment and declared with mutual certainty:
“Blood drinker.”
Marcy feels better after her purge and a roughly two-hour visit to oblivion. She passed out on the floor halfway to Clark’s couch. Leon tried carrying her the rest of the way, but she threatened, in a disembodied voice, to cut off his balls, so he let sleeping dogs lie, as it were, and returned to the kitchen to clean up her mess, except Clark had already lugged the philodendron outside, saying the next heavy rain shower would do what all rain showers did.
After her nap, she’s as fresh as a daisy. We tell her she didn’t miss much except the sun creeping up and the fact that we’re all a little drunker. Clark made a pot of coffee to sober us up, but we wound up dosing it with Kessler’s. Marcy takes a cup straight (of coffee, I mean) knowing she doesn’t have to be embarrassed. We’ve all seen each other puke by now. Well, except for Clark. About thirty years our senior, he’s a veteran of liquor abuse, a steel-plated guru of immoderation. One time, I watched him piss on a radiator in full view of the karaoke crowd at Flanagan’s, him thinking he’d stumbled into the men’s room and secured a urinal, swatting away anyone who tried to stop him and calling them queer, so yes, a philodendron pales in comparison.
The idea of breakfast is bandied around for awhile, talk of walking to the Parkside Diner, which opened at five, but Leon has the bright idea of repacking the bowl and we all get way too high, gacked out on sour diesel recently smuggled from Colorado. He and Marcy wax poetic about their road trip, the sort of thing that would normally bore me to tears, but at this point I’m so delirious I actually egg them on, pressing for more details, which they disburse freely, describing crazy geological formations, elk and prairie dog sightings, hikes in the foothills heightened by signage about wildcats and rattlesnakes, and a top-notch barbecue joint where they made pigs of themselves more than once under the spell of dispensary spoils. Sequoia, a friend out there who’d Marcy met at massage school, she was the one with the medical card. Semi-itinerant and living in a fifth-wheel camper, Sequoia had the inspired idea to set up her massage table at music festivals nationwide, making bank off the affluent, addled victims of too much moshing and orgying.
“She took us to a hot spring,” Marcy says. “Out in the middle of nowhere. You could see one of those big oil things off in the distance. The towers, what do you call them?” She looks to us for help, popping and smacking a strip of fragrant bubblegum.
Leon and I shrug.
“A derrick,” Clark answers, adding another snort to his coffee, then to mine without asking.
Marcy points at him. “Right! You could see one of those derrick thingies. It was clothing-optional. We were easily the youngest people there and it seemed like everyone else knew each other, like it was their local hangout.” She giggles and falls into Leon’s shoulder. “No one gave us a hard time for keeping our suits on. It was a very laid-back, very non-pervy atmosphere. That said, you could spot the swingers a mile away. I got the impression Sequoia usually strips down, but she held off because of us. Right, Leon?”
Leon smiles through slitted eyes and replies, “Def-in-ite-ly,” sucking every syllable as though they’re written on four gumballs, and it’s comforting, the way he says it, a word that so rarely applies to anything good.
In the end, we do hoof it to Parkview. It’s a foggy-chilly morning, the best kind after a night of hard partying, the most sobering sort of morning, with the first creeping color of fall in the leaves, and I think what if humans, too, momentarily got more beautiful before they died? What if my withered old grandmother, rest in peace, who slipped out of her La-Z-Boy in front of Bonanza last winter, filling her diaper, losing her wig, without dignity and without warning whatsoever (besides her age and fragility, of course), what if instead she’d transformed before my grandfather’s eyes into the woman he knew way-back-when in the war-bond days of Rockwellian Wisconsin, the one with sausage curls who broke in horses and brewed dandelion wine, whose whole way of life prefigured the cottagecore IG models of today?
Clark leads the way. He pays for it by stepping in a pile of dog shit. He’s distracted, lighting another Pall Mall. The turd is smack in the middle of the sidewalk. A stream of profanity further fragments my train of thought, scaring some crows from their boxelder roost. Clark’s voice is always phlegmier in the mornings. Today that’s especially true, his postnasal drip compounded by all-night conversation, repressed exhaustion, and a rate of chain-smoking unseen since MGM was making musicals. “Dante,” he growls, chewing on his words. “It’s that Great fucking Dane, Dante. That thing’s always off its leash. Shitting where it pleases. Barking. Scaring kids half to death.”
He marches up the walkway to the offender’s house. Marcy points out, to whatever end, that Great Danes are traditionally very friendly dogs, and I find something funny in her phrasing, this idea of dogs handing down traditions, codes of conduct and decorum, distinguishing themselves from lower, working-class breeds: the herders and retrievers and bomb sniffers. Her complexion, while always pale, isn’t as sickly anymore, it’s more pearly, and with her hair disheveled, her eyes huge and dark, she’s like a gamine straight out of Tim Burton’s sketchbook.
I remember waking up to Simone below the green filter of a tent. I remember the zipper mark from her sleeping bag stamped in her cheek like a Frankenstein scar. I remember it was cold, and her eyes fluttered open, and I handed her the case with her glasses in it, but she was so blind she didn’t notice, she just smiled and said, “Morning, handsome,” pretending she could see me.
The door of Dante’s lair is red. It has a fanlight and a brass mail slot and is flanked by hanging planters of pink and magenta mums. Clark drags the sole of his boot down the door, leaving a long chunky smear like olive tapenade. For added measure he leans on the doorbell. Leon mutters, “Ah, shit.” Then the three of us speed-walk to the corner, disavowing and disowning our elder. I look back in time to see a black muzzle shovel between drawn curtains, baring its teeth, slobbering on the glass, barking rabidly at Clark, who resumes his normal pace (or if anything, moves slower) just in case the owner wants to shamble out in pajama pants and square off.
Leon suggested I make a Cons list. Strictly the Cons, because what good are the Pros to me now? I might as well cite the Pros of moving to Hobbiton for all the good it would do me. Besides—as he pointed out—I’m having no trouble recalling the Pros. That’s the whole problem. They’re dominating the airwaves, violating the Fairness Doctrine. It’s time I hit back with a few scathing attack ads. Admiring Leon’s realpolitik, I set to work.
- Can match me drink for drink, yet I’m the alcoholic on account of my DUI.
- Calls The Godfather Goes gaga for Titanic.
- All her friends are gay men, suggesting a cattiness toward other women, a cattiness that I admit I’ve never witnessed firsthand.
- Only reads women authors. Belittles the greats (Updike, Hemingway, Cheever) purely out of ham-fisted feminist contrarianism. Gave me back DeLillo’s Underworld when it stopped being about baseball.
- The whole baseball thing. How she’s obsessed with it. So boring. So baffling.
- Doesn’t know a thing about art (“Rodin. Rodin. He’s big, right?”). Still laughed at me for thinking Botticelli was an opera singer.
- Totally unsupportive/unappreciative of my own artistic endeavors. Calls my cartoons misogynistic, sadistic, the product of a diseased mind.
- Favors sugar-packed dairy alternatives to be “healthy” when we both know it’s to be trendy.
- Likes Bon Iver and bands that sound like Bon Iver.
- Believes God is real but imperfect. Ergo, believes God is forgivable. Ergo, forgives God by still believing in Him. Ergo, by not forgiving me, which I can stomach, has stopped believing in me, which I can’t.
Halfway through breakfast, I have a sort of epiphany and pose an open-ended question to my peers. “Why exactly am I eating this garbage?” Greasy flavorless hashbrowns. Scrambled eggs that feel like cotton in my mouth. Bacon al dente, limp and pathetic. Not enough Cholula in the fucking world. I slide the plate away. When our teenage server asks me if I’m done, I tell him, “Hell yes,” my elbows on the table, head down and fingers laced behind my neck. I can feel the others looking at me. “It’s gross here,” I say into my paper placemat. “This place is gross.” I look up to see Clark shovel more of something called a gyro omelet in his mouth. I want to tell him it resembles the fertilizer Marcy used on his philodendron.
“It does smell a little funny,” she whispers, scrunching her nose.
“That’s the shit on Clark’s shoe,” Leon whispers back.
They prefer to sit across from each other, I guess the better to swoon and play footsie, so Marcy is beside me on one side of the booth with Clark and Leon on the other. Leon’s eyes are so red it’s like he has Ebola. He doesn’t say much, just smiles and plays with his beard. I can’t say I blame him. It’s so full and lustrous, with this copper-blond-ombre effect like it was touched by the hand of Midas. “God, Leon, that beard is glorious,” I tell him at one point. He beams at me like hipster Buddha. Though that’s not really fair. Not every young guy with a great beard who’s been to like four Flaming Lips concerts is necessarily a hipster.
“You’re wrong,” says Clark, grinning about the alleged odor coming from his shoe. “That’s Bluto you’re smelling, the owner. You should check out the reviews of this place some time. They’re terrible. Two stars at best. And most of it’s people complaining about poor Bluto. BO. Dandruff. Sweaty armpits. You name it.”
“Oh god.” Marcy looks down in horror at her half-eaten french toast, the syrupy wet strawberries like B-movie gore.
“Don’t make her go green in the fucking gills again,” I say, and she swats me. “You’ve read reviews of this place? And you come here anyway? You’re a decorated vet. You deserve better than this.”
Clark shrugs me off. He was a mechanic in the Army, got out right before 9/11 and avoided combat, so he gets upset when I embellish his experience like he stormed Normandy or something. I guess he’s ashamed, as any man would be, that he never killed anyone, and that no one ever tried to kill him. To make up for it he’s shot at plenty since. He’s an avid hunter, an all-around gun nut. We’re coworkers, he and I. We live in the same general area, so ever since my DUI we carpool to work. He swings by my building every morning before sunrise, then we stop at the Shell station to stock up on cigarettes and coffee, where the cashier gives us a first-responder discount because she seems to think Clark is God’s gift to women. At his age, sadly, he better exemplifies the bachelor lifestyle than I do. My attempted one-night stands never come with clean perforations. We always seem to exchange numbers. I always seem to call, or answer, and there always seems to be a second, third, fourth date, until the next thing I know, that Sagittarius aesthetician who blew me in her Camry is inviting me to Applebee’s to meet her parents.
When I remember Simone’s missed call, I fall silent for the rest of our time at the diner. I think everyone just assumes the night has caught up with me. A woman walks in, mid to late thirties, and selects a table alone, wearing purple scrubs beneath her jacket and the face of someone in the throes of deja vu. For a second my blood freezes over, and I whisper to my friends, “Angel of mercy.”