I should feel proud. By the mere fact of my youth, I am entitled to so much power. I feel the world spinning around me, the NASDAQ, the Dow, every index and indicator, the focus group, the cool hunters, the yearn forecasters — everything. So then why do I feel the way I do? Worse than ever I feel excluded. Worse than ever I feel singular, freakish, alone. I don’t care for computer gaming. Or computer gamers. I am not a fat, clammy kid who spends all my waking hours online and then either takes a machine gun to school in some perverse extension of the gaming life or ends up slumped among pizza boxes and tissues full of jizz as my fatty heart finally gives out, my game hand palsied and my parents full of guilt and halfhearted excuses about the distance of three-car garages, two-career marriages and six-thousand-square-foot houses.
That’s not me at all.
Yes, I spend time online, sure. Yes, I have the kind of pasty, fat body that will one day evolve into adult-onset diabetes if not total morbid obesity. Yes, I spend money on stuff. But there is nothing carefree about my life. Not anymore. Something has changed. I no longer have the privilege of total self-absorption. What I need right now more than anything is to figure out what her secret is. I have determined she is hiding something. I don’t think I am being overly imaginative, although all the crime books I read do affect my level of paranoia. They convey an ordered, systematic-but-rotten universe. And nothing is ever as it seems.
I followed her last night. I have started questioning everything about her. She teaches cooking twice a week — or so she claims. I waited until she left the house. She drove her Nissan even though it is only ten blocks to the community center. I got on my bike, which is a rare occurrence, and followed her. When I got to the community center, her car was parked there. I went down the halls, peeking slyly through the small windows in the classroom doors, the shatterproof glass panes with fine wire deeply embedded in them making everything a grid or like the crosshairs of a rifle. I heard my mother’s voice. I stopped and leaned against the wall. It was brick painted an industrial white. I stared at the speckled vinyl composite flooring. I couldn’t see in the classroom, and the people inside the room couldn’t see me.
(Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it transforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at-a-distance-but-close examination.)
“It is important to rinse inside and outside the bird.”
Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to the sound of your own mother’s voice?
“You must pat the skin and the cavity of the bird dry with a paper towel. Otherwise the seasoning will not adhere as you wish it to.”
She exists, you know, wholly in the world apart from me. She spoke slowly and with deliberate emphasis. She sounded authoritative but not a bit shrill. No ugly breaths or underweighted sentence ends. Not girlish or apologetic. Not sexy either, but soft and serious.
“I like to put slivers of garlic and truffles under the skin of the breast. Also pats of butter. It makes the breast moist and the skin crisp and flavorful.”
But I wasn’t there to admire her voice or hear what she was saying. I’m not quite sure why I was doing this. But then I realized I was trying to place her accent. Does she truly have a California inflection, or is there a hint of the East Coast or Midwest to her speech? As I listened, leaning against the cold white brick, I couldn’t remember what any of these accents sound like.
I headed out to the parking lot. I sat behind some trees with a view of her Nissan Maxima. It is a metallic, high-saturation blue-green. I waited. What for, I don’t know. Did I think she would meet someone after class? Is it merely a liaison I suspect her of? I waited. I noticed several other cars in the lot were the same blue-green, no-name color. Or else a deep red flecked with gold underlights. Or shiny black. It occurred to me — have you noticed that there are no longer any beige or brown cars? I know they existed once — I have seen them on old TV shows like Hawaii Five-O or The Streets of San Francisco. Brown, chocolate brown, or that taupe beige color, like a raincoat. It is strange how color schemes of various times are different. People used to like browns, military greens, creams and mustards.
You know, she doesn’t have one baby picture of herself? I think that is odd. She’s estranged from her parents, but I presume they exist somewhere. For some reason she just left all that behind.
Someone apparently decided that nobody wants brown cars anymore. Some fifteen-year-old, no doubt, in some information-gathering test situation declared brown old looking, uncool, or it made him not want to drive. And that was that.
Contraindicated
THE PILLS CAME in a small opaque plastic bottle. He pressed down hard on the cap as he turned it to open. Fastened to the bottle was a folded piece of paper with chemical chain diagrams, case studies and long lists of side effects. Charts with percentages of groups that experienced some of (but not limited to) the following: peripheral neuropathy; facial and testicular edema; impotence; stroke; hallucinations; myocardial infarction; sudden, unexplained death.
The pills were ovule, innocent shapes. Peaceful shapes. It was called Blythin. The improved supplement to his Nepenthex regimen. He swallowed two. Because. This was a new one, taken to augment the others he already took. You don’t ever stop taking any of them, you just add new ones or alter dosages. But things had gotten so bad lately.
Henry couldn’t sleep, and he decided to take a bath. He put on the lights everywhere in his house. If he were to look out his windows (he never did, particularly at night), he would see faces looking back (or probably he would), so he pulled all of his curtains closed. He didn’t even like to think about the covered windows because he could imagine so easily what he feared seeing. He also, for similar reasons, avoided mirrors. It hadn’t been quite this bad before. Things were getting worse. He couldn’t take showers anymore because he couldn’t hear well enough through the rush of water (hear what exactly?). But he could take a bath, in the middle of the night, with the door to the bathroom open, and most times make it to the morning undisturbed. Then he could take an exhausted drop into bed. He lay there and listened. His breathing.
Henry is in a plane again. This is a B-52. It is predawn darkness. He is in the tub, but he knows that he is flying over Quang Binh Province. He hears the loud-to-faint sound of bombs being dropped. He looks beneath him through the open hatch. The sky is lit up by showers of white phosphorus, arching in floral, organic, symmetrical shapes; the lines they describe are graceful. They are otherworldly, these electric trails and their already fading illumination. Light reflects off the water, glitter sparkles in the smoke. Then the bombs make contact, and beneath them and behind them he can see explosions.
Henry no longer feels the water on his limbs; he no longer sees the bathroom. He is on the ground, beneath the plane, not suddenly but as if he had followed the bomb down, he sees the ground come closer and closer in silent jump cuts. Henry hits the ground running, and he sees an explosion and then feels the breath sucked right out of his lungs, out of everything around him. The heavens are ignited, and the air has collapsed. Then he feels the burning on his skin. Something sticky on his skin, eating it. He runs and it burns worse, burrowing into the flesh. It has a gasoline stench. He knows what it is. It is jelling to his back and arms. He rubs at it, and it doesn’t come off, it just burns his hands. He jumps into a swampy tide pool, covers himself in water. But it still sticks, and he can really smell it now, gasoline, burning plastic, and burning flesh. NP2, or Super Napalm. He doesn’t feel anything but numb, but he watches the stuff burn through the layers of skin to the bone. He yelps and clamps his hand on it. It seems to stop, somewhat, but as soon as he lifts his hand it resumes burning down into him.