Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (9 page)

“Who's there with you?”

“Amy, my wife. We're just married.” Telling him this, Tad remembered that this was what he'd called to tell him. He thought it would be funny to tell Gar Floyd about getting married. “We're in Arizona.”

Amy stared straight ahead, implacable, like a rigidly disciplined athlete.

“What a great time,” Gar Floyd was saying. “Careless.”

“Sure,” Tad said. “We're seeing all there is to see. Your car's in good hands, that's what I called to tell you. We're checking all the fluids, using high octane. You'll have it in a few days.”

“I've got a rental now,” Gar Floyd said. “An Escort. It's a lousy car. The wind blows it all over the road. What kind of car do you drive?”

Tad drove an Escort. He didn't say anything. He watched Amy flop down on the bed and thought about his lousy, beef-brown Escort and waited for Gar Floyd to ask another question.

“You woke me up,” Gar Floyd said. “The least you can do is talk to me.”

Silence on both ends of the line, Tad in Arizona and Gar Floyd in Florida. Tad apologized again. He wished Gar Floyd and his wife well. He stressed the imminence of their arrival. Good-bye, he said. All right, Gar Floyd said.

He sat next to Amy on the bed and patted her arm while she studied the ceiling. “Just married,” she said. “Just married. Say it one way and it sounds like one thing. Say it another way and it sounds like something else.”

“I thought it'd be funny. It wasn't. What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing, everything. I want you to know when to be serious. Act like this means something.”

“I'm excited we're married, I'm ecstatic.”

“I'm not just talking about being married.”

“What then?”

“This. This moment we're in. Life, Jesus, look at me, you never look at me.”

Indeed, Tad was staring at the percolator on the counter, at its clear nipple, using it as a focal point. He looked at Amy, at her wide, wary face. Whenever she exerted herself, her cheeks flushed with ghost acne, like fingerprints on a steamed-up mirror.

She put her hand under his chin and held it strangely. She didn't blink for a long time. “What are you doing?” he asked her.

She let go and said, “Wishing.”

After Tad turned off the lamp, passing headlights lurched and danced inside the trailer. He watched them for a few minutes and resolved to leave town in the morning, whether the odor was gone or not. El Paso, Houston, Baton Rouge. He wanted to be looking at Bisbee through a telescope of better days.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” she said.

I
n the morning they walked their luggage to the service station. The Volvo was no longer in front, nor was it inside the garage. Looking around, Tad was surprised by the relief he felt, the sense of absolution.

“Where'd it go?” Amy asked.

Mexico, he hoped, where it'd be stripped, sold, scattered.

“They probably just moved it,” he said.

Inside the office, the two mechanics sat next to each other, reading sections of the same newspaper. The younger mechanic looked up and grinned at Tad while the old man kept reading. Jeff was sleeping on a folded towel in the corner, beneath a sign for Bar's Leaks.

“My partner thinks he had an epiphany,” the old man said.

“It came to me in a dream,” the other man said.

Tad looked at Amy, who had her arms folded over her chest. She knew he was looking at her, he could tell by how her expression went vacant. The four walked behind the station, Jeff trailing them. The Volvo sat in the clearing with its doors open.

The younger attendant ran to the car, gawkily animated. He arched forward and leaned in for a big, cartoon sniff. “Delightful,” he said.

“Potpourri,” the old man said, shaking his head. “Lime-scented.”

“Country summer lime,” the other mechanic said. “Get in! It smells so damn clean in here!”

Tad and Amy sat in the backseat, their feet crunching down on something as they got in. Tad saw that the floorboards were filled with dark green wood shavings and dried buds. Inhaling the sweet-sour smell, he was reminded of those scented soaps he was always tempted to take a bite out of. The dead-snake odor was no longer perceptible.

“It isn't bad,” Tad said. “It's better than it was.”

“My girlfriend buys it in bulk. This is what my bathroom smells like.”

The old man sat down in the passenger's seat. Tad hadn't noticed how big he was until he got into the car. He had to slouch forward so his head didn't touch the ceiling. Jeff jumped onto his lap and laid his snout on the headrest, panting.

“No charge,” the other mechanic said. “That's the best part.”

Tad reached down and grabbed a handful of the rough, ridged wood and then let it go. “No charge,” he said to Amy.

“On the road again,” she said, holding her hand out for Jeff to sniff, which he did, and then looked around warily. “Will you hand me that?” she said, pointing to the bouquet on the dashboard. The old man groaned as he reached forward and then handed it back to her. It looked brittle, careworn. She held it in her lap.

“No charge!” the young mechanic said. He started the car and pulled out of the clearing, kicking up loose dirt.

Out front, Tad loaded the car. He hung the dream catcher on the rearview mirror while Amy drove off, waving to the mechanics, who responded with succinct nods. As they headed east into New Mexico, the landscape started to make sense again and Tad felt an agreeable recession. Time, he knew, was vast—seen from a distance, each moment was nothing, a ripple, barely perceptible, nothing. Soon they would stop at a rest area and make love while other travelers gamboled in their designated areas. They'd stay in a motel shaped like a teepee. By the time they arrived in Florida with Gar Floyd's car, Bisbee would be no more than a minor layover, a place where—look, here's a picture, Amy and Tad smiling at the shrine—they were as happy as they'd ever be.

border to border

M
axim lost his crown. He was eating in Small World's employee cafeteria, already feeling thrown off by big, pink-necked Miss Beebee, who existed, as far as Maxim could tell, solely to throw him off. At the buffet line, she dumped a spatula-ful of Irish lasagna into his bowl, tapped the spatula twice on the side, and said, “You're beautiful, too.” She read his name tag. “It's a beautiful world, Maxim from Estonia, filled with beautiful people.”

“More sauce, please,” he said.

“Me and you, we got the kind of beauty that don't expire.” She dumped grayish sauce into his bowl. “
Interior
beauty.
Bone
beauty.
Psychological
beauty. Know what I mean?”

“No,” he told her. “My English, it's not nearly that good yet.”

At a table next to some Chinese acrobats in silk costumes, he ate Miss Beebee's latest attempt to gastronomically unite two cultures: cabbage and noodles and red sauce and fatty shreds of mutton—

He bit down on something hard, like a pebble. He tried to work it to the front of his mouth to spit it into a napkin—when into the cafeteria walked Paula. Tall, lovely, impervious American Paula. Paula with hair so soft-looking Maxim wanted to snip some to wear as a mustache. She worked in the Global Superpowers Pavilion with the other cheerful propagandists. Her job was to ask people filing out of the
Operation: Emancipation!
musical, “Do you have any questions about freedom?”

She moved through the cafeteria with the rehearsed poise of a gymnast on a beam, greeting everyone. Maxim held his breath, along with the food, the pebble, whatever it was, in his mouth. He waited.

“Arigato,”
she said to the table of Chinese acrobats.
“Hola,”
to a Central American couple. To Maxim: “And how are
you
?”

He swallowed the mouthful of food. He nodded. He smiled. He was, he told her, wonderful.

While Paula ordered, he inadvertently ran his tongue over his rearmost lower molar. In place of the crown that had sat there for the past ten years, there was a jagged crag of tooth. He could taste dental glue and decay, a bleating, blood-warm tang. Stealing a last glance at Paula at the gyro bar, he cleared his tray.

One look at Paula and nobody, Maxim was certain, could have any questions about freedom.

H
ealth Services was on the northern hemisphere of Small World, which was laid out like a world map, with different-colored border lines separating each of the countries. Maxim walked to the dentist's through an onrush of visitors. Men in sunglasses and visors and women with noisy, cheerless breasts. Foreign tourists hustling to miniaturized versions of their native lands. What did they find? If they were lucky and from Germany, they found a beer garden, a 3-D movie about knife-making, and the Putsch, a steel roller coaster. If they were from Estonia, they found Maxim and his fake Estonian coworker, Danni, in a modified gypsy cart beneath a leprous oak, selling an array of bells.

Maxim was traversing Scotland when a couple stopped him. The woman studied his uniform—lavender peasant hat, peasant shirt, peasant pants. She covered his name tag with her hand and said, “Venezuela?”

Maxim pointed west.

She gripped the name tag and said, “Wait now. Nepal.”

He pointed east.

“He obviously doesn't know English,” the man said. “I mean, look at him. He has one of those faces like, ‘I have suffered some unspeakable shit.' ”

“He has to know where he's
from
in English.” Turning to Maxim: “Okay: Malaysia, Serbia, Hungary, Turkey, Nicaragua, Argentina, China, Peru.”

Maxim nodded and the woman said, “Peru? Peru! He's from Peru!” and Maxim continued nodding until she released his name tag.

“Hooray,” the man said sarcastically.

I
n the dentist's chair, Maxim studied smeared fingerprints on the adjustable light. They seemed to imply a struggle. The dentist rolled in on a low stool. “Broke your crown,” he said. “And Jill came tumbling after?”

When Maxim didn't reply, the dentist said, “Old joke.” He snapped on a pair of blue latex gloves. “Allergic to these?”

“I don't know,” Maxim said. “I've never eaten one.”

“Hot damn,” the dentist said. Attached to his glasses was a device like a jeweler's loupe, and when the dentist leaned over, Maxim saw himself mirrored in convex glass, his face fixed like a happy cadaver.

While the dentist browsed Maxim's mouth, Maxim thought about his tooth. Originally, he'd broken it on a frosted cookie in his parents' doughnut shop in Delray Beach, where they emigrated when he was ten. His mother had been examining a dollar bill on which
I OWNED SLAVES
had been stamped over George Washington's tired head. She made tut-tutting sounds—not about the owning of slaves, but the defiling of dollar bills—when Maxim bit into the cookie. He'd tried to hide it then, too. Covering his mouth with his hand, he watched his mother dump out four quarters from the cystic fibrosis jar and replace them with the sullied dollar.

“Not bad,” the dentist said. “Not a bit bad. Some Eastern Euros open their mouths and . . .” He shook his head solemnly. “Dresden. Crushed bridgework, missing teeth, gum disease, canines ground to the root. The teeth tell me everything. You've had an easy life. You favor the right side when you chew. The dentist who did that crown went to a state school in the Midwest.”

Maxim's chair pitched forward. “Are we done?” he asked.

The dentist snapped off the gloves and made notes on the chart. “All we can do is wait for that crown. Shouldn't be more than a day, give or take, right?”

Maxim rinsed and spit, rinsed and spit. “Will it be expensive?”

“How do you mean?”

“The new crown. I don't have dentist insurance.”

The dentist nodded, agreeing not with Maxim but in recognition of the oversight. “How to put this.” He bit his lip. “The crown you swallowed, it's fine. It broke off clean. You just need to . . . fish . . . no,
retrieve
it the next time you—”

“Wait, wait. Please,” Maxim interrupted. “You're not asking me to search my feces for a fake tooth, which you can then put back in my mouth, are you? So that every time I eat I can be reminded of my feces?”

“Maxim, if you want a pretty new crown, we can do that. It'll be about sixteen hundred dollars, but we can do it. You also have cavities that need filling.”

Maxim ran his tongue over the tooth, remembering how his mom had insisted he tell the first dentist to just pull the tooth. No one will ever see it, she said. You have plenty more teeth. Maxim never told him this. He lied and told her the man refused to pull it.

“I'm here for you regardless,” the dentist said, forming the latex gloves into a ball. He rolled into the hall to wash his hands. And then, with a little too much glee: “You're the one who has to look at himself in the mirror.”

B
ack in his dormitory, an hour before work, Maxim looked at himself in the mirror. He found that if he squinted while flexing the muscles along his jawline, he could make himself into a somewhat interesting-looking tragedy victim. The kind of a man women thought about only in retrospect, after seeing his picture in the paper next to a story about a bungled carjacking or accidental carbon monoxide poisoning.

I remember
him
, they would say. Maxim had done some thinking about this. They'd recall him as the man they didn't spend enough time admiring. We mistook his shyness for gloom! they would say. We failed to see how secretly handsome he was. And now he was gone, poor, overlooked Maxim.

Their hypothetical pity comforted him.

At this moment, the crown wended its way through his upper digestive tract, confused, still pretending to be a tooth. Maxim felt sorry for the crown. He felt sorry for Maxim. Sixteen hundred dollars was about two hundred and fifty hours in the bell cart. He couldn't call his mother, his mother had no money either.

He fell asleep to the sound of televisions in adjoining dorms, and woke up feeling crushed beneath some ogre's calloused thumb. Still unsure whether or not he would retrieve the tooth. Mostly he didn't want to think about it. Some decisions you dwelled on for days, carefully clarifying them like calculus problems, enjoying the steady tumble toward a verdict. This was not one of those decisions.

M
axim and Danni watched teenagers run by the cart on their way to Germany's roller coaster. “Come here!” Danni yelled. When one complied, he said, “First off, slow the fuck down. Second off, come look at these amazing handcrafted bells.”

Danni's real name was Danny. He was Dominican, but he didn't get along with his countrymen in the Caribbean section, so he'd been reassigned a month ago. He possessed a pinpoint malevolence, which was invigorating until he focused it on you. He was also an enthusiastic salesman, fearless, volatile, ineffective.

Later, when the line to the Putsch stretched past the bell cart, a man with hostile blond hair knocked on the counter and said, “Tell me three things about Estonia.”

Danni turned to Maxim, and Maxim said what he always said: “We're on the Baltic below Finland. Our most recent revolution consisted of a human chain. Millions of citizens organized a peaceful protest by holding hands from border to border and singing for our freedom. Millions of us. It was stunning. I was young but I participated.”

The line to the Putsch inched forward and the man did, too. He thanked Maxim for the information, no doubt simultaneously voiding it from memory.

“We also make bells,” Danni added, pulling a large bell from its hook. “All day long, bells bells bells. It's all we do!”

The man couldn't hear him. Danni was holding the feature model, a brass-plated bell manufactured in Vietnam, which sold for $11.50.

“We don't really make bells in Estonia,” Maxim told Danni after the line thinned out.

Danni scrutinized the bell for a long time. “Then how come me and you are out here sweating in this dogsled of bells? Over in the Dominican, my people are selling six different kinds of iced drinks. Christ. What do we make in Estonia?”

“Toilet tissue. Car parts, I think. Lumber.”

“Goddamn.” Danni returned the bell to the hook, silencing the chime with his thumb. “It's a good thing we left that shithole.”

Maxim walked to Russia to use their water fountain. When he returned, a teenage girl was sitting on a stool in front of the Bell Cart, listening while Danni spoke with his eyes closed. The girl, fleshily pretty, was swinging her bare feet.

“All of us holding hands,” Danni said, “like this.” He reached for the girl's hand. “Border to border, singing for freedom and glory and shit. It was just . . . I can't even explain in English. You know the feeling you get in your heart when you're making love to several people at a time?”

Apparently the girl, who let go of Danni's hand and walked off, didn't know the feeling. Maxim sat on her stool. The wood was warm from her thighs. “I asked you not to tell that story. That's my story.”

“Your story?” Danni kicked the bottom of the cash register. “You think anyone cares about your dusty-ass country?” He looked at all the bells, plainly angered by them. “
Estonia.
It sounds like a damn larva or a venereal disease.”

“Estonia's not dusty, Danni. If anything it's muddy.”

“Dusty, muddy. It don't matter. I just make stuff up when you're gone, Maxim. I tell people our highest elevation's a trash pile. That our chief exports are clowns and rape. That our government's run by some goats and dogs and pregnant cats and—”

“Enough!”
Maxim shouted. He was gratified by the little jolt it caused Danni, the flashbulb-stunned silence. “People's homes aren't for you to joke about. You should try thinking a few things you don't say.”

Danni gathered himself and leaned into the counter separating them. “And you,” he said, “should try some mouthwash. Because your breath smells dead like that hot-sausage water in Germany's Dumpster.”

Danni laughed, hopped off his stool, walked away. Maxim switched seats and pushed
PLAY
on the folk music CD that management had provided, a jangle of strings and bleating and moaning, like the soundtrack to a murder. He began to feel pulled backward. He thought of the human chain stretching from the northern border to the southern border of his country. His mother to his left, his father to his right, Maxim was connected to the lakes and to the sea. The chain ran past their house, white clapboard with blackbirds loitering on the eaves and a feeble reef of smoke above the chimney. He imagined they sang songs like the one currently playing, but he couldn't remember ever hearing anyone sing while he lived there. Not even the birds. Before the chain dispersed, his mother had leaned down, let go of his hand to wipe his face, and said, with her customary look of grim inspection, “We will never be happier.”

He'd returned to Tallinn once, with a former girlfriend, Lori. They went to attend the funeral of Maxim's great-aunt. Whenever one of Maxim's relatives chatted at her in Estonian, she nodded and smiled. “I'm just here,” she answered very slowly, “to show my support.”

The way she showed her support was by telling everyone she was showing her support. Maxim's cousin, who spoke some English, took him aside and asked, “Who is this woman? What is her sport?”

Tallinn was flower stalls and tubercular houses and rebar skeletons holding together heaps of rubble and him and Lori arguing constantly: on the open-air bus through his old neighborhood, which had been razed and replaced with tract housing. They argued in the city park where he used to play soccer, now overtaken by panhandlers and fake veterans. They argued in bed before going to sleep and just after waking up. Maxim wasn't good at arguing. He didn't have the stamina. After a while they'd argue about the way they were arguing, Lori's nostrils flaring like hog nostrils, and Maxim would feel like jabbing his thumb into her eye or biting her tricep, something resolute and silencing, something unforgivable.