Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (5 page)

D
avid adjusts his stance so that the distance between his feet equals the span of his shoulders. That’s the way. He cranes his neck to one side, then the other, really stretching his muscles, loving the tiny pops of the vertebrae. He’s imagining: blue helmet, scuffed plastic, padding on the inside worn thin; weird
thereness
of the cup in his underwear; the itchy uniform. He’s holding a mop handle. He has the music turned way, way up. He’s taking practice swings.

Roger is a good-looking guy, and everyone says that’s the worst part. David sort of thinks that’s funny, that it says something about how people are, but what he really means is that he thinks he’s as good-looking as Roger is, though Roger is a runner, strong, toned, rides his bicycle to work and for pleasure.

Sometimes, when Roger thinks nobody is around, he hobbles out to the porch to smoke a cigarette and have a sob. But David, mop handle on his shoulder while the changer is between discs, can hear him.

A week and a half ago, Roger ate a few doses of acid too many and decided to find out if God existed by climbing onto the roof and asking the moon. After a few hours up there he began to yell. Estrella was pretty sure that some wine would level him out. She stood in the dark yard and cooed. (She was putting herself out, being sweet like this; it was not her nature.) She tried to lure him down with a jug of the bitter merlot they always seem to have on hand. Roger called down that yeah, he probably could use something, but he was scared to try and negotiate the ladder, which kept going staticky like bad TV reception whenever he tried to focus on it. So she brought the bottle up, they sat, and he told her secrets about the moon that were really about a secret love for her, and she touched his hand and turned him down, and they talked about God for a while.

The moon had told him God was real, and that He had selected Roger for a particular mission, but then it had gone silent, and Roger didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing. The last thing the moon had told him was that he would need a helpmeet (it had used that particular word, he said) and when he saw her head appear over the edge of the roof he had taken her for a sign, which, he said, he still wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t. She told him that she thought God
was endless, beyond all finite and ultimately illusory constructions such as identity. Estrella is the kind of girl you listen to and want to believe. Roger agreed that God was above all things mortal and physical, but when she told him that this meant that God—who does not play war games—could not have selected him for a mission, he became agitated. She had meant to liberate him from the burden of the impossible, but seemed instead to have driven him into despair.

Had the moon lied? Perhaps the devil was afoot. He eyed her.

She climbed back down the ladder, left him with the wine. Another hour went by. Then the words
I WILL
clarioned in the night, followed by a raucous hosanna that devolved into a scream. David and Estrella pulled out of a kiss, sat up on the couch. David reached over and flipped a light on.

“What the fuck?” Estrella said.

How long has it been since David actually played a game of baseball? The city leagues, the Optimist league. His dad coached teams comprised of his best friends and select hangers-on. He thinks of things his dad would say:
Eye on the ball
or, if he was being too choosy, Dad would say,
Swing! Don’t go down looking.
If your swing wasn’t even, if it angled down too far, coach would call out,
Hey quit chopping wood out there
, or, if it was angled too far up, it would be
This isn’t golf, son!

He had not loved it, and when he got just old enough for it to become clear who was and wasn’t any good, he gave it
up, nearly without regret. Had hardly thought about it, in fact, when his father decided to keep on coaching even after he quit. (The old man, in his prime, could have made the minors or maybe gone further, but for whatever reason never tried out.) David realized, looking back, how much it must have meant to his dad to scream at scrawny kids under the bright lights of the city field, his tee shirt (“
COACH
”) tucked into his blue jeans, the brim of his cap crisp; he wasn’t a folder. He took all his teams to the playoffs and some to the championship. Well, his dad had never been cruel, at least, as disappointed fathers could be.

Sometimes, David even went and watched the games. He remembers being happy that his father was happy, and thinks, now, with some pride, that this was a pretty grownup feeling for a kid to have.

Roger never did say what he agreed to on the roof, but he’d obviously failed to do it. Now drunk, but still hopelessly high on acid, he crawled across the front yard. He dug his fingers into the ground. He dragged himself forward like a maimed zombie in a horror film.

David and Estrella carried him inside and helped him to the couch, talking—not quite bickering—about who would drive Snapcase’s car to the ER. They ignored Roger’s protests. Snapcase was asleep. They could wake him up, see if he’d do it, or just give over the keys.

“But isn’t he sleeping one off?” David said.

“Yeah, but maybe he’s better now,” Estrella said.

Estrella told Roger he should ice his foot and he said okay, but then they didn’t have any ice. David filled the trays up, came back to the living room. Roger kept insisting he was fine. He hadn’t hit his head, right? He’d landed on his feet, mostly the left one, which currently could not bear any weight whatsoever, which was why he’d been crawling. He said that meat was amazing—how weird it was to be
made
of something.

The wine, whatever was left of it, was still on the roof. They sat around and had some beers, smoked a joint—nothing too heavy. Estrella thought Sammy had Percocet but he was out somewhere.

“Think you’ll sleep now?” Estrella said.

“Oh yeah, yeah for sure,” Roger said. The rush of the jump seemed to have cleared his head. He was no longer talking crazy. Maybe it had neutralized the acid. (Who knew how these things actually worked?) Soon the beer and pot would take care of the adrenaline and he would get some rest.

They helped him into a better position on the couch. He was good and stretched out, his foot elevated on a stack of pillows. (They forgot to check on the ice they were making.) David tossed a blanket his way, and he and Estrella retired to their separate rooms.

Later, Estrella padded past the living room on her way to the bathroom. She wore boy boxer shorts, her black hoodie with the Hüsker Dü backpatch, and a pair of oversize plush
Homer Simpson slippers that someone had scored from the Dumpster at the bottom of frat row. She stopped in the doorway and looked in on Roger. “Y’okay?” she whispered, hoping he’d be asleep.

“Yeah,” he said sleepily—then, “love you.”

“Night,” she said, and shuffled across the linoleum, slippers whispering. She let herself in to David’s room.

In the morning, passing through the living room on his way to the kitchen, David saw that Roger was still sleeping. He called Roger’s job and said Roger needed the shift covered—family stuff, emergency. A grandma. David still didn’t like soy milk in his coffee. It usually separated and got gross. But Estrella was vegan lately, so there was no real milk in the house. He’d have happily stolen some, in order to satisfy his taste without fueling the industrial-agricultural complex, but her reasoning had as much to do with health as economic morality.

He fished around in the cups with his spoon; first his, then the other. No chunks. He’d done okay. He brought the two steaming mugs back to his room.

Roger got a soft cast and crutches. Stay off your feet, they said. He had broken his ankle, the doctors told him, and it had been very stupid of him to wait. If the bone had already begun knitting, he would have to have it professionally re-broken.

They left the ER at sunset, the pink hospital like a part of
the sky, a dull spot in the burning pink-orange shot through with blue and some tatters of gathering black. Probably it would storm.

“What am I going to do?” Roger said.

“You’ll stay with us,” David said. It was the right thing and because it was the right thing he wasn’t just saying it, he meant it, too, even though Roger made him feel competitive in a way he could not articulate, for a goal he could never quite specify. It buzzed on his tongue like a sharp mint or a blocked word.

“Of course you’ll stay with us,” Estrella said. Snapcase was driving, a beer between his legs. There was really no question. They were a family. (Nobody had seen Sammy in days. Maybe he’d hitched upstate, or met someone, or gotten busted, except wouldn’t he have called from jail?) Snapcase eased through a red light, then half a block up saw a cop car hiding behind some bushes. It hadn’t seen them. He came to a full stop at the next sign, sipped his beer—in his hammy fist it might have been a Mountain Dew.

At Roger’s follow-up visit, they scolded him about the antibiotics. They told him that alcohol neutralizes antibiotics, so doubling the dose was never going to do the trick. They told him they’d told him all this the first time he was there. Did he want to lose his foot? Roger cast his eyes down and he was very sorry.

He promised to take the drugs and to not drink, but he
also decided not to pay for the rebreaking of his bone. If it became necessary, he’d have one of the guys do it,
then
go over to the hospital and get it set.

Snapcase wanted no part of Roger’s crazy idea. Sammy, who was home again, said he’d do it, but nobody thought he was strong enough. David told Roger he’d think about it. He said it “intrigued” him.

“I mean it’s real violence,” he said to Estrella. They were in bed. “I guess wife-beaters and psychos do this kind of stuff all the time.”

“And cops.”

“Right. But those people are so fucked up they don’t even get it. That it’s like this totally
there
thing. This leg. A person. Totally nontheoretical. The Real.”

“David, those people
live
in the Real. And so, in fact, do we.” She drew him into the aura of her warmth. “You poor theorist,” she said.

David tells Roger to put up the cash for the bottle. That’s only fair. The whiskey is for courage, partly, but not really. David is looking forward to this. He wants there to be a bottle because to swig whiskey before swinging straight and true seems proper in a grand sense, like knowing just how to act at a funeral or during a riot.

When the new disc settles into the tray and starts to spin, Roger’s snuffling and hitched breath disappear. Social Distortion fills the world. A guy they know plays in a weekend
league and he’s bringing a real bat over when he gets off work, but for now David’s still swinging the mop handle.

After his friend drops off the bat, David sits and holds it, gingerly, as if it were volatile or imbued with magics. He’s imagining Roger’s bone shattering and how it will feel to do a righteous violence. Estrella says Roger seems depressed, and she’s going to bunk out in the living room with him tonight. Okay, David says. Probably it’s nothing. Even if it’s not nothing, still okay. Stretched out diagonally on his bed, luxuriating like a king (when she’s there they sleep in a sweaty tangle), in his mind he deals blows that have Roger screaming through his bite-rag. Like an expectant father with a wife’s overnight bag packed and ready, David has carefully washed a single tube sock. He keeps coming back to what Roger said on the night he hurt himself. That word.
Meat.
If all goes well he won’t actually see the meat. Still. It is so red and shiny in his mind.

The swelling is going down. Roger says maybe they should wait another day. David says he thinks they’ve waited too long already, but Roger says he feels different, somehow. He’s always known his body’s rhythms. He feels a rally.

Estrella tells David it’s obvious something is wrong. Can he just fucking spit it out already?

“Perhaps,” he says, “it might be I’m jealous of the attentions lavished by women on the nobly enfeebled.”

“Oh Christ.” Estrella rolls over and away from him. “Who’s that? Barthelme?”

“No, but isn’t it pretty to think so.”

“Fucker,” she says.

He grabs her shoulder, pulls her toward him.

“Oh,” she says, still annoyed, but intrigued. “So that’s how you want to play tonight?”

When they take the cast off, the leg is shriveled and the muscle sags. The black hairs press into the skin. He looks like the recipient of a graft. The doctor uses the word
miracle
. David finds such word choice unprofessional, as well as, frankly, a bit excessive.

Roger becomes reinvested in the devout Catholicism of his youth. He moves back into his own place, starts going to Pax Christi meetings, works himself back into shape. They seldom see him anymore.

But sometimes, when David wakes up early enough, he’ll spot Roger out on his morning run: sweaty, renewed. Probably Roger is oblivious to the figure in the window. Does he ever give a thought to what he stole from David when he was healed? David tries to make himself forgive Roger, but he just can’t. After a while he doesn’t even want to.

“I mean you
know
I would never—”

“David.”

“I—”

“Just
stop
. Just shut up and let me look at this.”

Estrella is at the bathroom sink, her right arm over her head, her left hand touching her right breast, prodding it to test its sensitivity, studying in the mirror the crimson bite mark on its underside. It really didn’t bleed that much; a bruise is all it should have been. The skin breaking was a total accident. It’s the middle of the night, another night. David, silenced, finds himself reflecting on how rarely they do anything during the day.

“Baby,” he says.

“Don’t,” she says. “I mean it’s okay, it’ll
be
okay, you know whatever, but right now just don’t.”