The old man unzipped his fly and, lifting out his cock, began pissing on the wall.
Little Mister Kissy Lips fumbled with the strings of the bag. It was remarkable how long the old man stood there pissing because despite every effort of the stupid knot to stay tied he had the pistol out before the final sprinkle had been shaken out.
He laid the fulminate cap on the exposed nipple, drew the hammer.
He said “Ha!” And even this, rather than being addressed to the boy with the gun was only a parenthesis from the faintly aggrieved he resumed each day at the edge of the water. He turned away and a moment later he was back on the job, hand out, asking some fellow for a quarter.
334
Part I: Lies
1. The Teevee (2021)
Mrs. Hanson liked to watch television best when there was someone else in the room to watch with her, though Shrimp, if the program was something she was serious about—and you never knew from one day to the next what that might be—, would get so annoyed with her mother’s comments that Mrs. Hanson usually went off into the kitchen and let Shrimp have the teevee to herself, or else to her own bedroom if Boz hadn’t taken it over for his erotic activities. For Boz was engaged to the girl at the other end of the corridor and since the poor boy had nowhere in the apartment that was privately his own except one drawer of the dresser they’d found in Miss Shore’s room it seemed the least she could do to let him have the bedroom when she or Shrimp weren’t using it.
With Boz when he wasn’t taken up with l‘amour, and with Lottie when she wasn’t flying too high for the dots to make a picture, she liked to watch the soaps. As the World Turns. Terminal Clinic. The Experience of Life. She knew all the ins and outs of the various tragedies, but life in her own experience was much simpler: life was a pastime. Not a game, for that would have implied that some won and others lost, and she was seldom conscious of any sensations so vivid or threatening. It was like the afternoons of Monopoly with her brothers when she was a girclass="underline" long after her hotels, her houses, her deeds, and her cash were gone, they would let her keep moving her little lead battleship around the board collecting her $200, falling on Chance and Community Chest, going to Jail and shaking her way out. She never won but she couldn’t lose. She just went round and round. Life.
But better than watching with her own children she liked to watch along with Amparo and Mickey. With Mickey most of all, since Amparo was already beginning to feel superior to the programs Mrs. Hanson liked best—the early cartoons and the puppets at five-fifteen. She couldn’t have said why. It wasn’t just that she took a superior sort of pleasure in Mickey’s reactions, since Mickey’s reactions were seldom very visible. Already at age five he could be as interior as his mother. Hiding inside the bathtub for hours at a time, then doing a complete U-turn and pissing his pants with excitement. No, she honestly enjoyed the shows for what they were—the hungry predators and their lucky prey, the good-natured dynamite, the bouncing rocks, the falling trees, the shrieks and pratfalls, the lovely obviousness of everything. She wasn’t stupid but she did love to see someone tiptoeing along and then out of nowhere: Slam! Bank! something immense would come crashing down on the Monopoly board scattering the pieces beyond recovery. “Pow!” Mrs. Hanson would say and Mickey would shoot back, “Ding-Dong!” and collapse into giggles. For some reason “Ding-Dong!” was the funniest notion in the world.
“Pow!”
“Ding-Dong!” And they’d break up.
2. A & P (2021)
It was the best time she could remember in how long, though it seemed a pity none of it was real—the rows and stacks and pyramids of cans, the lovely boxes of detergents and breakfast food—a whole aisle almost of each!—the dairy shelf, and all the meat, in all its varieties. The meat was the hardest to believe. Candy, and more candy, and at the end of the candy a mountain of tobacco cigarettes. Bread. Some of the brands were still familiar, but she passed by these and put a loaf of Wonder Bread in the shopping cart. It was half full. Juan pushed the cart on ahead, moving to the half-heard melodies that hung like a mist in the museum’s air. He rounded a corner toward the vegetables but Lottie stayed where she was, pretending to study the wrapper of a second loaf. She closed her eyes, trying to separate this moment from its place in the chain of all moments so that she’d always have it, like a pocketful of pebbles from a country road. She grappled details from their context—the nameless song, the spongy give of the bread (forgetting for the moment that it wasn’t bread), the waxiness of the paper, the chiming of the registers at the check-out counters. There were voices and footsteps too, but there are always voices and footsteps, so she had no use for these. The real magic, which couldn’t be laid hold of, was simply that Juan was happy and interested and willing to spend perhaps the whole day with her.
The trouble was that when you tried this hard to stop the flow it ran through your fingers and you were left squeezing air. She would get soggy and say the wrong thing. Juan would flare up and leave her, like the last time, staring at some insane cloverleaf miles from anywhere. So she put the so-called bread back and made herself available, as Shrimp was always saying she didn’t, to the sunshine of here and now and to Juan, who was by the vegetables, playing with a carrot.
“I’d swear it’s a carrot,” he said.
“But it isn’t, you know. If it were a carrot you could eat it, and it wouldn’t be art.”
(At the entrance, while they were waiting for a cart, a voice had told them what they were going to see and how to appreciate it. There were facts about the different companies who’d cooperated, facts about some of the more unusual products such as laundry starch, and what it would have cost the average person shopping for a week’s groceries in terms of present-day money. Then the voice warned that it was all fake—the cans, the boxes, the bottles, the beautiful steaks, everything, no matter how realistic it might look, all just imitations. Finally, if you were still thinking of lifting something just for a souvenir, it explained the alarm system, which worked chemically.)
“Feel it,” he said.
It felt exactly like a carrot, not that fresh, but edible.
“But it’s plastic or something,” she insisted, loyal to the Met’s tape.
“It’s a carrot, bet you a dollar. It feels like a carrot, it smells like a carrot—.” He took it back, looked at it, bit into it. It crunched. “It is a carrot.”
There was a general sense of letdown among the people who’d been watching, of reality having intruded where it didn’t belong.
A guard came and told them they’d have to leave. They wouldn’t even be allowed to take the items they’d already chosen through one of the check-out counters. Juan got obstreperous and demanded his money back.
“Where’s the manager of this store?” he shouted. Juan, the born entertainer. “I want to talk to the manager.” At last, to get rid of him, they refunded the price of both tickets.
Lottie had been wretched through the whole scene, but even at the bar under the airfield afterward she didn’t bother to contradict his version. Juan was right, the guard was a son of a bitch, the museum deserved to be bombed. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the carrot. “Is it a carrot,” he wanted to know, “or is it a carrot?”
Dutifully she set down her beer and took a bite. It tasted like plastic.