Afterward, when I was fishing on the floor for all the coins that had fallen from my jeans pockets, I saw the jar underneath her bed, mustard-sized, with a misty liquid floating in it, like cloudy water from a Mexican tap. Removing the lid, I sniffed tentatively, irrationally expecting the odor of sour milk. It smelled of nothing at all. I turned and watched her thin body settle on the bed. “Don’t spill it,” she said, before giving me another in a long dynasty of perfect smiles.
I dipped my finger in the jar, whipped it out, and licked it.
Salty.
I thought I knew what that meant. But could it really mean what I thought it meant? Was I actually, in reality, holding a jar of tears? Her tears?
“Tears, huh?” I said, as though everybody I knew collected their own tears, as if the whole world did nothing but forge monuments to their own sadness. I could imagine her pressing the little jar against her cheek, when the inaugural tear looked like the first raindrop sliding down a windowpane.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“I just collect my tears, that’s all.”
“Come on. There’s something more.”
“There’s not. Don’t you believe me?”
“Absolutely not.”
She stared at me a moment. “OK- I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.”
“OK.”
“Promise you won’t take it the wrong way?”
“That’s a hard promise to make. How will I know if I’m taking it the wrong way?”
“I’ll tell you.”
“OK.”
“OK. I’m collecting my tears because…I’m going to make Brian drink them,” she said.
I gritted my teeth and looked out the window. Outside, the drooping autumn trees looked like golden brown shrugs. “You’re still in love with him!” I shouted.
“Jasper!” she screamed. “You’re taking it the wrong way!”
About two weeks later she heaped another insult on top of the last one. We were in my hut, making love, making a hell of a racket this time, and as if going out of her way to confirm my worst suspicions, right in the middle of it she called out his name. “Brian!” she moaned breathlessly.
“Where?” I asked, startled, and started looking around the room for him.
“What are you doing?”
I stopped when I realized my stupid error. She gave me a look that deftly combined tenderness with revulsion. To this day the memory of that look still visits me like a Jehovah’s Witness, uninvited and tireless.
She climbed naked out of bed and made herself a cup of tea, grimacing with guilt.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking.
“I don’t think you should close your eyes during sex anymore.”
“Hmm.”
“I want you to look at me the whole time. OK?”
“You don’t have any milk,” she said, squatting in front of the bar fridge.
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s lumpy.”
“But it’s still milk.”
She hadn’t finished sighing when I went out of the hut and walked in the darkness to Dad’s house. We were always breaking into each other’s houses to steal milk. It has to be said: I was the better thief. He would always come in while I was sleeping, but because he was paranoid about sell-by dates, I would awake to the sound of thunderous sniffing.
The night was the kind of thick, all-encompassing black that renders concepts such as north, south, east, and west unusable. After I’d stumbled over tree stumps and been slapped in the face by thorny branches, the lights of Dad’s house welcomed me and depressed me at the same time; they meant he was awake and I’d get stuck talking, that is, listening to him. I groaned. I was aware of our growing estrangement. It had started after I quit school and gradually worsened. I’m not sure why, but he’d unexpectedly resorted to normal parenting, especially in the use of emotional blackmail. He even once said the phrase “After all I’ve done for you.” Then he listed all that he’d done for me. It sounded like a lot, but many were small sacrifices such as “bought butter even though I like margarine.”
The truth was, I could no longer stand him: his unrelenting negativity, his negligence of both our lives, his inhuman reverence for books over people, his fanatical love for hating society, his inauthentic love for me, his unhealthy obsession with making my life as unpleasant as his. It occurred to me that he hadn’t made my life distressing as an afterthought, either, but had gone about dismantling me laboriously, as if he were being paid overtime to do it. He had a concrete pylon for a head, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. It seems to me you should be able to look at the people in your life and say “I owe you my survival” and “You owe me your survival,” and if you can’t say that, then what the hell are you doing with them? As it stood, I could only look at my father and think, “Well, I survived in spite of your meddling, you son of a bitch.”
The light was on in his living room. I peered through the window. Dad was reading the newspaper and crying.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, opening the sliding doors.
“What are you doing in here?”
“Stealing milk.”
“Well, steal your own milk!” he said.
I walked in and tore the newspaper out of his hands. It was one of the daily tabloids. Dad got up and went into the next room. I looked closer at the newspaper. The story Dad had been reading was about Frankie Hollow, the recently murdered rock star who, coming home from a tour, had been confronted by a crazed fan who shot him twice in the chest, once in the head, and once “for good luck.” Every single day since then the story had managed to make the front page, despite there being no additional facts after day one. Some days the papers included interviews with people who didn’t know anything and who in the course of the interview revealed nothing. Then they squeezed every last drop of blood out of the story by digging up the dead star’s past, and when there was absolutely, positively nothing left to report, they reported some more. I thought: Who prints this toe jam? And then I thought: Why is Dad crying over this celebrity death? I stood there with a thousand belittling phrases swimming in my head, trying to decide if I should lay the boot in. I decided against it; death is death, and mourning is mourning, and even if people choose to shed tears over the loss of a popular stranger, you can’t mock a sad heart.
I closed the paper, more clueless than before. From the next room I could hear the television; it sounded like Dad was testing the volume to see how high it could go. I went in. He was watching a late-night soft porn series about a female detective who solves crimes by showing her clean-shaven legs. He wasn’t looking at the screen, though; he was staring into the tiny oval mouth of a can of beer. I sat next to him, and we didn’t talk for a while. Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” I asked.
“Thanks, Dad,” Dad said.
I sat there trying to think of something sarcastic to say in retort, but when you put two sarcastic comments side by side, they just sound nasty. I went back into the labyrinth and to the Inferno in my bed.
“Where’s the milk?” she asked as I crawled in beside her.
“It had lumps in it,” I said, thinking of Dad and the lumps within. Anouk and Eddie were right- he had slipped back into a depressed state. Why this time? Why was he grieving over this rock star he’d never heard of? Was he going to start mourning every death on the planet Earth? Could there be a more time-consuming hobby?
In the morning when I woke up, the Inferno was gone. That was new. We had obviously fallen to a new low- in the old days we would’ve shaken each other out of a diabetic coma to announce our departure. Now she sneaked out, probably to avoid the question “What are you doing later?” My hut had never felt so empty. I buried my head in my pillow and shouted, “She’s falling out of love with me!”
To distract myself from this sour-smelling reality, I picked up the newspaper and browsed through it, cringing. I’ve always hated our newspapers, mostly for their insulting geography. For example, on page 18 your eyes fall on the story of a terrible earthquake in some place like Peru with an insult hidden between the lines; twenty thousand human beings buried under broken rubble, then buried again, this time under seventeen pages of local blabber. I thought: Who prints this gum disease?