Ivyland (18 page)

“First of all, it's not your house. It's Henri's. And second of all  .  .  . second is that you're being an asshole. You know who you remind me of?”

“No.”

“I don't know what I expected.” She starts stamping her foot, then looks at the bottom of her shoe. Henri's face appears in the stained-glass window of Sipwell's door as he opens it.

“Sorry, just on our way back,” I have the wits to mention.

“That's okay,” Henri chimes, “I'm leaving, taking Grady home. What'd you think of him? I get the feeling he's been really underestimated at Harvey House. His condition actually seems pretty mild. Maybe I can get him a job through Second Chance or something.”

“I think you have to have had a job and lost it,” I say.

“Not as affected as they—definitely not violent or aggressive,” Henri says. “Which is why he's allowed out like this. Not as good with language  .  .  . I don't know.”

“You gonna have time to be his friend?” I want to know.

“Someone should give it a shot,” Henri says.

“He's jealous that you have a pet Hallaxor kid,” Phoebe says. Her body sinks, molds itself to the right angle between the brick wall and sidewalk. Henri sees my expression.

“O, Aidan,” he jeers, putting the dumb sunglasses back on, “nobody could replace you.” And with that he reaches out for a fraternal shoulder grab, only to shock me badly again, the static going right through my shirt.

“
Dammit!
” I snarl, the drinks fueling it now. “You eat a car battery for dinner?”

“I'm sorry,” Henri says. “I can't help  .  .  .”

“Then see a doctor.” When I look back to Phoebe, she's clutching herself at the elbows, trembling slightly.

“I did.”

“Well?”

“Just whatever, okay?”

“You're the worst.”

Phoebe gurgles to life, pointing at the space between me and Henri. “You. You think you're not  .  .  . you're no better,” she drawls, and the venom in this near-sentence drips quietly for a while longer.

“Are you done?”

“Brothers. I might've known,” she groans, rising, and vanishes around the corner before I can even appreciate that's she's mobile. We consider her departure until my curiosity starts nagging me.

“What did the doctor say?”

“Forget it.”

“You get me like this, make me meet your retard friend . . . fuck.” The eloquence has nowhere to go but up, but it's been plateaued around nil for some time. “You act like something's wrong with you, and then you clam up because you know it's bullshit.”

“I don't. I don't deserve it,” Henri insists, face shaking. “I don't have to tell you.”

“What happened? I thought we were having fun tonight.” I'm par for some hungover regret. “Let's find Phoebe; I'll apologize?”

Grady stumbles out of the bar as though shoved and collides with Henri, who stabilizes him.

“Hi again, you,” I try, waving. But Grady's already forgotten my face. Henri pushes me aside, leading him into the street by his shoulder. This early in the morning, no cars are out, leaving the pair free to meander down the middle of the road, passing under a traffic light that sports its cheap red. A clown nose. When they're directly under the light, it flickers twice and is hushed into blackness, a candle gently snuffed in a breeze. Forgetting that Phoebe's already gone, I ask her if she saw it too.

The dead stoplight reawakens as a lustrous green after a dozen seconds of throat-tightening outage, a lonely electric lime nailed onto nothing, its black case blending seamlessly into a bruise that hoods the sleeping world.

Henri and Grady have moved on. They walk, weaving back and forth in the road to avoid roadkill and potholes, through another four intersections. I watch. Until they fade from sight, I let the flawed film unreel. Each intersection, Henri—and Henri alone, I could swear—kills off a red light that returns as a green, creating a plaintive rhythm of red, flicker, black … green … red, flicker, black … green … that aches more with every repetition. Moonlight follows that same path, still touching them when I wipe my eyes and squint, wrapping their bodies like another skin when they finally meet the ink-blotted distance, Henri turning around, one arm still across Grady's back, and examining the horizon to see if I'm there.

*

Grady does come over in the future, but to his credit, I was wrong. He only ever broke one thing, and that was Henri's old pogo stick—who knows how it'd held out so long in the first place. The dusty artifact's spring-loaded plunger creaked with rust when Grady took it out to the driveway, and one of the footholds soon snapped clean off.

Grady mentions later on, or I'm given to understand, anyway, that he had a friend named Pogo as a kid. Henri mouths to me:
imaginary.
He has a new ferret he brings over from time to time, and Henri suggests names for it. They debate passionately, stopping to ask my opinion on “Hal.” They ride bikes together in a spring-like February, Henri on his old blue piece of junk, Grady on mine. They make vague plans for a road trip, something neither of their families had ever attempted.

One day it all glides to an end. Henri buys Grady his own bike with a basket, a new helmet, goes with him on a test-run, says goodnight, and never invites him over again.

“Just starting to like him,” I mention one frosted morning in early April before heading out to campus, noticing one of those caterpillars that were everywhere the year before. It's dragging itself up and out of the kitchen sink drain. Henri, trying to destroy every functional brain cell by playing online poker nonstop (and nonetheless doing rather well), lets his head drop back over the top of his chair.

“It  .  .  . we couldn't be friends anymore.”

“Because?”

“He had this—I hate to say it, but it was too much to handle.”

I can see Henri's eyes for once, marbles with coal at the center.

“Those sunglasses fell by the wayside fast.”

“What, the aviators.”

“Yeah.”

“They didn't work.”

I turn from the door and stare at Henri, who smiles tiredly as it closes, and start laughing for real once I'm alone in a freak swirl of weightless snow outside.

DH /// OXBONE, MICHIGAN /// LAST WINTER

Every third bar, Lev finds a foreigner. This time it's an Australian in a horned Viking hat and what looks to be real, polished chain mail.

“
Was
with a friend. Kiwi bloke, my drummer. Too pissed to see.”

“Why was he angry?”

“
Pissed
, mate. Legless.”

The bartender paces over to us from the register, where his only other customer is staring into a mug. We are three quarter-lengths of the bar removed from this despondent, oddly familiar man. As the bartender begins to speak, he puts his hands flat on the wood, thumbs stuck out at right angles, six inches of space between. He's done this eight times now, and in every other instance he licks his lips before asking if we want another. We do. The Australian wants two, which'll have to be factored in. Lev is squeezing him for data while I watch the self-erasing Coriolis swirls in grease-prints made by the bartender's stubby fingers. Every time the minute hand of the ornate cuckoo clock in the corner hits a multiple of twenty, Lev slips me another P to take the wooze out of the gas, help the patterns come back. Words waft by.

“What do people down under think of America?”

“Fat, guns. Stupid.” The guy is a parody of hammered. “Bossy?”

“I mean the country.”

“Is it true that at MaxiLickin'SurfHogs here,” (he actually says
Maxi
) “you can get a kilo of chips? And a schooner of cola.”

“Sure,” I pipe up, 15% more clever when drunk. “But that's a medium.”

“Why don't we shut up,” Lev suggests.

Over the rows of liquor bottles, there's a plaque with an engraving of a suspension bridge next to a crying lady in a tollbooth and the assurance:
Big Win
—
We'll Never Forget
. Next to that is a picture of two grayed guys smiling alongside statues of a horse's head and a castle. GREETINGS FROM THE WORLD'S 2ND LARGEST CHESS SET! is the frame's leering gold inscription. The whole room, really, is humming colors that warble giddily, teetering on some brink. Lev ignores it. A green light above the billiards table drones an exact minor third, a musical concept I learned from reading the Johnston kid's unused music theory books, but never quite heard in the wild till now.

Down in Kentucky we saw an old redneck and a black boy hustle seventeen consecutive games of nine-ball, taking in an average of fifty bucks per game, which they split sixty-forty, as the boy had to do all the work of goading the mark and setting up the diamond rack freehand while the man got to gulp bourbon in a corner and act drunker than he was. The boy always sank his last ball in a corner, swaggering with charm the way no white guy can; the old guy sucked the last of a crumpled cigarette before carelessly banking his into a side pocket. Lev and I offered VV in return for their winnings. The elder belched a belch of acid smoke and curdled dairy. He croaked a afterthought-ish sound.

“What'd he say?” Lev asked.

The boy translated: “Says he has a bridge to sell y'all.”

The old grifter wheezed and clutched at himself.

*

Leviticus is trying to convince the Australian to come to an actual MexiLickin'SurfHog with us, but the dude saunters off to take a leak mid-proposition. “I know this man,” I say, “or his doppelgänger.” “I don't,” Lev insists, biting bloody fingernails, “know anyone like this guy.” Probably the angles of his skull, I theorize, similar mouth-width to chin-width ratio as someone back home. I'm thinking football team—maybe Ryan Danke? That's the P talking, Lev says, it's the Viking getup and your Freudian issues with Lenny's shitty mini-golf place, is all. He twists his head in every direction, saying we'll help him to the truck, talk him into a nose job. I'm like, tell me the difference between that and kidnapping-slash-violent assault, then maybe,
maybe
I'll consider. Lev's ass should be in jail already, but I'm staying lily-white innocent as hell. Just on call while he works. Handling the tools. I wash them, wipe them clean, but that's the extent.

The Australian emerges, fly horribly agape, water matting his Prince Valiant bangs. With notable difficulty he mounts a stool.

“So … American hamburgers?” Lev beams. “Sexy teenaged wage slaves? Might like you better with a shapelier nose.”

“Can't. Kiwi'll miss me: prolly off for a bat.” The hulking fake Norseman, having just settled onto his seat, abruptly stands, snatching his unfinished drink off a coaster that might be floating a millimeter above the bar. “Bloody … thing is. Awaiting. Musn't disappoint.” The Viking helmet slides askew, covering his right eye at a forty-five degree angle and greatly startling its wearer. I snarf my drink, beer-snot bubbling out of my nose. People shoot me their looks.

“Wait,” Lev begs. His nostrils flare, blood draining from them. That happens when he's anxious. The Australian trips on his way out but recovers, spilling zero liquid.

“Off to throw another shrimp on the barbie?” I say, starting to bark the laugh that Lev says is an excellent argument for euthanasia. The sad other guy at the end of the bar raises one eyebrow and sips an eighth of his glass.

“Not now,” Lev hisses.

“Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, Oi, Oi!” I scream, knocking an empty mug off the counter with a gesture I can't quite recreate, shrieking when it explodes on the floor. The Aussie replies, Oi!, raising his mug in a doomed toast, thinking he's at home instead of piss-freezing Oxbone, Michigan, where barren fields outnumber souls.

“Watch it, you two,” the bartender scowls, cheeks twitching. You can
tell
that he beats his children, and I'm about to say as much when it occurs to me that this glittery minefield of glass on the floor is doubtless a replication of the southern hemisphere's stars. I've never been below the equator. But I like to think, even without knowledge of constellations, that I'd recognize a different sky when it pulled together overhead.

“I'm an anesthesiologist, you fucking peon!” Lev's screaming at the bartender, and you can hear in his raspier voice that he hasn't abused our anesthetic in far too long. “I take the pain away!”

“Adieu!” the Australian calls, opening the door to expose snow raking sideways across the dark. He wobbles. The snowflakes in their cone of streetlight leave white wavering trails, sperm striving toward an asphalt egg. Every flake: exactly the same.

“Son!” the bartender yells. “You can't take that drink outside!”

“Awright, mate. I'm lucky.” He surveys the room. “Dead set lucky,” he assures us all, and with the merriest “Cheers!” I've heard since we last ran into a drunk Australian, he turns and is swallowed by the blizzard.

Our drinker at the end of the bar finally speaks, revealing four fillings, one for each quadrant of mouth:

“Europeans,” he mutters.

*

We drive in blankets of snow, and I'm scared, but I'd be more scared if I had to drive, so I'm glad Lev doesn't let me. First he bitches me out for not recording our conversation with the Australian in the notebook. “Notebook,” I go. “Don't even know where that shit
is
.”

That makes him real mad.

It snows in reverse, the flakes flying from the hood up the windshield as we blow through pearly matrices, pink fringes of northern lights the blizzard's gauzy backdrop. Storm walls bulging and dopamine-flavored. I ask Lev does he see what I see. He says if you mean Inuit spirits playing football with a walrus skull in the sky, then yeah. I open the glove compartment, reaching for the shaving kit bag Velcroed to the inside. Lev wants to know if I remember what we're doing. The new mission he harps about. I know. “But do I
remember
,” he asks, “do I get it done.”

“Of course I do. I'm very goal-oriented.”

“Then why do you keep fucking with me?” Lev asks. “Stop spazzing like Professor Delirium Tremens. Stop provoking people. We need them.” His lighter snicks and torches a 100, of which there are two hundred twenty-seven butts on the floor, accumulated since the high school fundraiser car wash and Tom's daughter, the cheerleader in the red bikini. He's angrier since quitting the gas and overdoing the P. Sometimes his chest pops out so hard I reach for a tank, but he says the worst is over.

“We're helping,” I say.

“Poor can't afford VV without us.”

“And they need it.”

“Illegal not to need it. But we've got other tasks to consider.”

Seven more butts arranged in a flower on the dash. I did that. Lev talks while I suck gas: You do realize, he says, even you must realize, that with these nootropics in us we need only one pure specimen, one hick or greasy diner or ghost town whose pattern will unlock it all and make the grand plan manifest. One will do it, will decrypt everything about this place, because America defines itself recursively and every tiny part implicates the whole, okay? A grain of sand, the fractal truth … but I stop listening, because I don't need to hear Euclid invoked in this truck again. Falsehoods sound falser with each repetition.

Patterns fading, I take two pills with the beer. Then two more, with more beer. The cigarette-butt flower is more of an amputee octopus. Lev clams up after mumbling that he doesn't need to spend his time explaining self-evident theory to someone who obviously doesn't give two perfectly spherical balls of beetle shit about it. There's the dull pitter-patter of his asymmetrical index fingers drumming on the wheel, at nine at two. It takes four tapped beats for the windshield wipers to do a full circuit, squealing intolerably on each return trip.

I choke on a breath as Lev's face shoots wide. He rolls down his window—it's colder than a caring universe would allow. A piece of paper clipped to the sun visor, bearing the forbidden quote, is ripped out into the inky void.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern
, it said. We don't impose shit, Lev says. It's
there
. You only gave it a name.

He puts his head out, says take the wheel. I'm uncomfortable with this.

“Stop whimpering. This is important,” he shouts over the wind, letting the wheel go entirely, leaning out his window to scan the nothing. There's no telling the road apart from the clouds, the storm, a certain death. Lev's scrubs snap and snap and snap. Double-time against the wipers. One shirtsleeve's cuff is spattered with who-knows-who's blood. Patient. Victim. His own. But we always slip the noose. People wake up a little disfigured, certainly without their wallets. But that's what you get for wanting black-market hair plugs. The main concern is that while I was first being ravished by my cheerleader in the back of our truck, Lev was sneaking around a hospital in Andronicus, Florida, a pretty major one, slipping P to any patient who didn't know enough to resist. The alibi, which he's made me repeat endlessly: Leviticus Van Vetchen, respected son of legendary surgeon Brutus Van Vetchen, was at the National Anesthesiologist Convention in Cleveland when these post-ops woke up and began obsessively counting whatever was available to count. One guy apparently yanked out his IV needle and etched a bloody web of lines between freckles. Connecting the dots.

Lev had burst into the truck, which we'd parked in a lot by an abandoned betting parlor, on what you'd think was the wrong side of the tracks if you hadn't seen the east side first. My cheerleader coated herself with some loose gauze nearby while he blathered on about when they first synthesized LSD, and how all these scientists at the CIA were just dropping it in each other's coffee, no warning whatsoever, to see what happened. I'm of the mind that you can't enjoy or appreciate that sort of thing if you don't grasp what's going on, but Lev will be Lev.

“Why is he bloody?” my cheerleader asked.

“I didn't kill anybody,” Lev said, which struck us all as very funny at the time. I asked him why he'd shaved his head (answer: “One. Too. Many. Layers.”), and my cheerleader said that growing up around here her mom always used a bowl to give her a mushroom cut that she hated even more than being blonde, and always in a motel or someplace she wouldn't have to pick up the clippings.

We ate handfuls of Belltruvin to that and did gas (except Lev swore then that he was done with it and just had some of everything but) and she and I happily fucked again, with Lev watching, and we all passed out in a loving dogpile. In the night we shifted and I lay with Lev, as close as we could be without touching.

I woke up to Lev driving us, my cheerleader gone.

“Got out to go to pee,” Lev said.

“Go back and get her,” I said.

“That was three states ago.”

I thought hard about what I wanted to say.

“You fucking unhuman,” was what came out.

“Stroking your head the whole time you slept,” Lev said over the sound of my weeping, tossing a bottle of Belltruvin. His eyes in the rearview saw past me. “She loved you.” I opened the bottle. The worst part of this man is he will defuse you.

“Object-lesson,” he said.

*

The truck makes a fatal metallic clang and starts to smell funny.

“What'd you do,” Lev snarls, slipping back in. “Clutch is cuntified.”

“You. I didn't want to drive.”

“You're right. Accountability doesn't suit you.”

Pulled over, hood up, the smell is much worse. Wiggling my nose, I can feel frozen hairs crunching inside. Lev examines the car guts, eyes doing two full circular sweeps of seven seconds each. He swears and reexamines, one sweep this time.

“Impossible.”

“What?”

“Clutch friction disc is toast. Truck only breaks down in states with a Latin motto.”

“Minnesota's isn't Latin?”

“Does ‘
L'etoile du Nord
' sound fucking Latin to you?”