“Hey, help me with this thing,” he said. I took one end and we carried it together into the elevator. “One of the zombies fell on it and knocked it over.”
“Is everyone okay?”
“Yeah, I think so. The guy was fine. They won’t even miss it; they can’t understand what they’re watching anyway.”
“Yes they can.”
“Are you kidding me? Those people are gone. They don’t know what’s happening. Two of them thought I was their son, and I’m Chinese.”
“They’re still people.”
“Whatever that means. The more time I spend here, I think more and more about how they’re just these bags of guts being wheeled around, and it’s like the gears are turning inside, but just out of habit, nothing is alive.”
At the ground floor we went outside and around to the back where the Dumpsters were. We did three windup heaves and then let the TV go into the back of one of the Dumpsters. The screen shattered and the body settled among the papers and cardboard.
Back upstairs, one of the orderlies came up to me. His name was Manuel, he was about twenty-five, and had a kind face.
“Hey, Tanya’s daughter came by and saw the pictures you made of Tanya. She liked them.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you should go see her. Room twelve twenty-six.”
I walked over to Tanya’s room. Inside, it was dark. The overhead light was on, but it was weak and had a green cast. There were two beds in the room; Tanya was sitting on the edge of one, staring at the floor. The other bed had a naked mattress on it. I said hello and she looked up, and when she saw it was me she gave me her smile. I walked over and sat on the empty mattress across from her. Our knees were almost touching because the room was so small.
Then I noticed the two pictures framed on the wall behind her. They looked like a memorial.
“How are you?”
“Fine. I fine,” she said, smiling.
“I see you put the pictures up,” I said.
“Pretty. You draw so well.”
“No. I think I’m crap,” I said. “Sorry, I mean, I’m no good.”
She slowly reached over and took my hand. Her hand felt like sticks in a sheet. She cradled my hand with both her hands.
“You good,” she said. “You so good, a good boy.” She lifted my hand and held it to her face. Her cheek was softer than I expected. I moved my thumb around a little and felt her wrinkles. They were just there, skin folding on itself.
“You good,” she said again. “You captured me good.”
She smiled and I felt the soft skin bunch under my fingers. I looked into her smile. There was someone in there.
Part III
April
Right before eighth grade I moved from Phoenix to Palo Alto with my parents and older sister, Tiff. My dad came to work at ROLM. I could play soccer and I smoked more than anyone. But in Palo Alto, even when the other soccer girls were nice to me, something didn’t fit.
Mr. B was my soccer coach. His first name was Terry, and his last name was Brodsky. He’d been “Mr. B” for years, he said. He was forty-two. He had all his hair and tan skin and wore a purple baseball cap a lot. After a week, he told me I was the best soccer player in the eighth grade. He told jokes about dogs and horses and skeletons and I laughed at them. “A skeleton walks into a bar and says, ‘Give me a beer and a mop.’” The ones about horses were even worse, and sexual, but I laughed. He would also make fun of the boys in my class. “I saw Teddy Morrison changing the other day and I think he’s missing the hair under his arms,” then he’d laugh.
After two months in Palo Alto I had made some friends, Shauna, Sandy, and Alice Wolfe. And our soccer team was doing well. At the end of practice one day, Mr. B asked me to babysit his son, Michael. “I have a date this Saturday,” he said. “I know, stupid.” I told him it wasn’t stupid.
“I don’t know why I even try, it’s going to be dumb.”
“I can’t Saturday, Shauna is having her bat mitzvah.”
“Bat mitzvah? Ha.” He was sweating at his temples from coaching us. “You going to go make out with some Jewish dudes at the bat mitzvah?”
“No, but she’s my friend.”
“I know she’s your friend, she’s great—a little horsy in the face, but—no, sorry, that’s mean, I didn’t mean that. Look, you should go, but if you did this for me, I’d consider it a personal favor. I don’t think I’ll be out late. I’m going out with a teacher. Just bring your dress and you can change at my place and I’ll drive you to the party after.”
I thought about it and then I said okay. Shauna Woo was on the team. She was nice, but also just a girl. Her dad was Asian and her mom was Jewish. She was rich and she had just about everything, but she had been bitten on the face by a dog when she was younger. There were two jagged lines across her left temple and the top of her cheek.
On Saturday I went to Mr. B’s at five thirty and he left for his date. His son, Michael, was five, he had a round head that was a little pointy on top, and unlike Mr. B he was blond. He was nice but he was just a kid, empty and selfish. He sat on the floor and looked up at the TV and played his video game.
“What are you playing?”
“The Legend of Zelda.” He was controlling a green elf walking around a graveyard.
“What are you doing with that flute?”
“It’s an ocarina. It does stuff. Like, you can call fairies, or call your horse.” The elf played a song on the flute and day turned to night and then lightning hit a grave and it exploded. Then the elf jumped into the grave.
My older sister, Tiff, had given me a joint for the weekend and I went out on the porch and lit it. It was nice to smoke alone. I leaned on the wooden rail and it was wet from dew but I leaned on it anyway. The sky was black with a dark blueness at the horizon, and different from a Phoenix sky, sadder. I watched the blueness sink below the houses until there was only black and stars. I smoked half the joint and licked my fingers and put out the end and put the unsmoked half in my Reds pack. I lit a cigarette and sucked hard. Shauna and everyone were at the party already. She had become a woman that day, but she would always have her scars.
When I went back in Michael was still playing. The elf was riding on a horse, galloping across a grass valley. I told Michael he should stop playing so we could watch a movie. Mr. B had a videotape of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Michael said he wasn’t allowed to watch it but I let him. We sat on the couch together. Sex in a baseball dugout, sex in a pool house, an abortion. The joint made all of it funny. Michael didn’t laugh or say anything. He was really quiet when the boobs and vaginas came out. Then it ended.
“I don’t want to go to bed,” he said. I picked him up and carried him into his room. I put him under the blankets and I lay next to him above the blankets. I guess he should have brushed his teeth but I thought, “Fuck it.” There was nothing to say because he was a little kid. I stared at the ceiling. I thought about my sister. Sometimes we laughed so much that I thought we’d never stop. But we hadn’t done it much lately; she had a boyfriend now. Then Michael was asleep.
At eight Mr. B came home. “What are you watching?” he said. I was watching Cheers. He sat on the couch a little away from me. On TV Cliff was joking with Norm and Sam. He said, “Well, ya see, Norm, it’s like this. . . . A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. . . .” He was going to tell a joke but Mr. B started talking. “Well, that was a shitty date.”