Lucky Alan : And Other Stories (9780385539821) (12 page)

“Your sneakers are soaked,” my mother said. This was true of both of us; Deanna plumped down beside her rucksack to pry them off, though she had difficulty even undoing the laces. “Actually, everything’s soaked,” I said. Our jeans hadn’t dried despite the Samaritan’s blasts of engine fumes. “You feel like throwing this crap in the dryer?”

My parents fell silent. “Let me show you the world-famous empty room,” I said, and, before my father could speak, added, “No clothes allowed.” Deanna shrugged and began peeling away her outer layers. My girlfriend was a specialist in rising to occasions.

“It’s almost midnight,” my father whined.

“Will you bring us some blankets and pillows and stuff?” My father lifted a cookie from a desultory plate that had been set out, possibly many hours ago, and began gnawing. He could as well have chewed his shirtsleeve or arm.

Was my mother a conspirator, too? All I know is she executed my commands (for they really were commands) with robotic precision. She delivered pillows, copious smoothly folded sheets, and the guest bed’s duvet to the door of the empty room. By this point Deanna and I were concealed naked behind it, having widened the gap only a few inches in order to toss our undergarments onto the pile. Midnight came and went unremarked on either side of that barrier. “Candles,” I answered, when, as I opened
the door to gather in offerings, my mother asked whether there was anything more we needed.

“Your parents seem pretty great,” Deanna said with superb neutrality, as she lit the first of the joints she’d rolled. We’d switched off the empty room’s ugly overhead, and outside the snow, dribbling down through a windless sky, glowed like blue cotton candy in the penumbra of the driveway’s single bulb. We fucked twice, quietly but concealing nothing, Deanna’s three outcries rising through the ceiling and floorboards above, Arfy curling meekly onto a pillow in the corner once it was clear no attention was available for her.

Afterward I crept out. My mother and father had retreated upstairs. Deanna and I used the bathroom and then I collected some Tupperware for future such occasions. I also gathered food, including a Saran Wrapped platter I found in the fridge, full of triangular sandwiches: chicken salad, cream cheese and cucumber, crustless and heavily salt-and-peppered, just the way we liked them. I moved the den’s stereo into the empty room, too. It wasn’t good, but good enough for Deanna’s homemade cassettes.

Charlotte came tapping at our window, clued in by our tread marks in the snow or the flickering candlelight. Wrapping myself in a sheet, I raised the sash. Arfy keened delight, nosing at the opened window, and Charlotte waved off whatever friend had delivered her home. Headlights swerved into the night.

“What time is it, anyway?” I asked her.

Charlotte shrugged. “Four, five, beats me. Is that peepee?” She meant the yellow fling pattern staining the snow behind her. I nodded. “Sick,” she said approvingly.

“Climb in.”

The empty room, being a tabula rasa, bore aspects of total corruptibility, a potential we’d in childish obedience overlooked until now. Our poses, cross-legged in sheets around the plate of triangular sandwiches, the ashtray, and the flickering candle, which illuminated the tumble of pillows and duvet like a pink-pale mountain range, evoked perhaps a Native American or Haitian voodoo ritual site. Nothing of this scene would have signified much in a dorm room. Here: revolution.

“What’s that?” asked Charlotte.

Deanna understood the question. “They’re called Echo and the Bunnymen. This is ‘The Killing Moon.’ It’s pretty much their best song.”

“You got Mom’s sandwiches? That’s crazy.” Charlotte accepted the joint from Deanna’s hand. Arfy clambered into her lap.

“It’s safe out there, if you want something from your room.”

“You guys want to fool around, huh? Dream on, unless you want to put up some kind of tent out of these sheets. Because no way am I leaving here before you.”

“You don’t have to leave,” said Deanna. “We already fooled around.”

My sister raised her hand. “Enough about that.”

“They’re upstairs,” I said.

“Well, congratulations on a unique accomplishment,” said Charlotte, with sardonic emphasis derived from my father’s manner, however much she’d have hated to believe it. “They haven’t been upstairs at the same time in a year.”

“If we keep the music playing I doubt you have to worry about them coming down.”

“What are you suggesting?”

I gestured at the empty room, a vacuum laboratory.

“Haven’t you ever wondered,” I asked my sister then, “how much stuff we could fit in here, if we tried?”

I do not think I shall visit my blog anymore. It is not so much the smell that discourages me—gulls have skeletonized the corpse in the entranceway, and the lapping tide has salt-rinsed the floorboards where the intruder’s blood was once caked as thick as fruit-leather—as it is a certain malodor of memory persisting there. The stink of my disappointment being that stink which the sea’s salt can never rinse.

*

I study my blog through binoculars from the distance of the boardwalk, but never approach. Gulls wheel over my
blog’s entranceway, vultures at my kill, much as they do above the splintery planks of the boardwalk, scavenging the greasy paper sleeves containing, if a gull should be lucky, some remaining tidbits of cakey frankfurter bun, the last dark rejected french fry like a withered witch’s finger. Let anyone imagine I gaze at the horizon. It is a kind of horizon at which I gaze, an inner-made-outer vanishing point, a place where feeling ventures out to make a meeting with language and finds itself savaged.

*

I will not forgive The Whom. He would not forgive me.

*

I thought I would see justiny at last, but the tiny bird has flown. The question I cannot allow myself to ask: Were they not two, but one? Was The Whom pretending to be justiny? Or was justiny pretending to be The Whom?

*

It was him I killed. He is not unnamed. He has a name, even if inadequate, bogus, contrived. The man I killed, The Whom. It was The Whom who tried to enter my blog and it was The Whom I wanted to keep out and The Whom I laid low with a single remorseless thrust with the
blunt editorial object I had carried with me hidden on my person and with which, gripped knuckle-tight, I lay in wait inside the entranceway of my blog. It was The Whom I wanted to reduce to gibberish with my disemvoweler, it was him I wished to see undone and unspeeched it was him who poisoned the well and stole the goose it was him who could never would never be silent I tell you it was never other than The Whom.

*

A man tried to enter my blog. I killed him at the entrance there. In order to make you understand I would have to go back to the beginning and that is impossible. I am not trying to hide anything, I swear this.

*

I could never have protected anyone. I don’t know who or what I was trying to protect. Since the day I killed the unnamed man there has been no one else remotely near the blog, no evidence of justiny, not an extinguished sasparilla candle, not an herbal-cough-drop wrapper. justiny has gone, if he or she ever dwelled here. justiny, I now believe, was as frightened of me as he/she was of that malignant other, the man I killed. And will I go unpunished? I have come to believe so. My blog is a site on no map, is sanctioned in no precinct, patrolled by no militia.
Its occupants have only ever constituted its sole authority. The three of us, if it ever was three. Or two. Now gone.

*

A man tried to enter my blog last night. I killed him in the entranceway with a blow to the head. I felt in the impact as I heaved my cudgel and met with his grunting pumpkinthick skull that he was dead, and I discarded the brainoiled implement in the darkness there and ran upstairs and hid in a far high corner of my blog in bereavement and horror not so much at what I had done to the man I killed, to that rotting gourd full of evil, but at what I had done to myself and to my solitary majestic kingdom here, to my elegant elaborate and irreplaceable redoubt now beshitted in revenger’s shame. But it was done. He is silent now. I will need to pass his body there in the entranceway if I am to leave, the mouth-stilled black form slumped in the dark joint of wall and floorboard with its dumb black legs blocking the threshold. I am not afraid.

*

I wait in the dark huddled like an animal now, but it is an animal I have come here to meet, an animal I am seeking to purge and correct, and to do so I have had to turn myself into an animal too. The time for tender thoughts is adjourned.

*

What is going on here jaw I am so scared and freaked out this isn’t funny any more why is the whom doing what he is doing and is he even who he says he is???? There r times when I cant trust anyone or anything even myself justiny

*

I’ve secreted myself in one of the upper rooms. I hold in my hand an implement, an editor’s tool, the exact weight and shape of my indignation at the doings of The Whom. My blog must not be spoiled. I will defend it, I will defend it with my life. I need look no further for a cause than dear little justiny, of whom I see no sign. I suspect the poor creature has pocketed her- or himself in a cupboard somewhere, nibbling on stale crackers or fingernails with teeth chattering in fear of The Whom’s depredations, to reemerge only when the foulness has been purged. The quarters of my blog must be made safe for those who’ve come for solace here.

*

O jaw u should of seen it when u weren’t around he was dominating this place just screwing with everyones minds pretending he was u and sayin if im the jaw u r my bubble gum u r my popcorn u r the gunk in my back molars and u ought to wait im gonna floss u out eccchhhh gross jaw hes such a lowbrow cant u do sumthing signed desperately yrs justiny

*

More ruined rooms, unbearable even to specify in this log—so many of them now, chambers of my soul forever sealed against the night.

*

I built too near the sea. The salt air corrodes the inlaid rosewood veneer. And at the moon’s perigee the tide licks my door. On some nights I sit in the parlor of my sad savaged blog and think it was only a dress rehearsal, a dry run. That I will build another blog elsewhere and make its seams tighter, armor it and therefore myself better for the world. But to abandon this one now would be to betray justiny. I say this to myself even as I hear the waves crashing nearer than I ever wished them to, the waves that are like a pulse of hatred beating in my forebrain.

*

We coexist, invisible to one another, an uneasy blind roundelay within the forgiving architecture of my blog. Here, I find evidence of justiny’s self-effacing encampments: squeezed-out tea bag neatly wrapped in a paper napkin, glass bearing a wilted daisy, scattering of dandruff, faint odor of lemon verbena or chamomile. There, I wander dismayed into rooms Whomed: overturned or demolished in derision, furnishings all glued upside down on the ceiling as in sophomore japery, library volumes with their pages torn or twisted from their spines, a turd curled in an ashtray. Once, I found a parlor cleared of all its treasures and bric-a-brac, which had been replaced with paper slips, fluttering on the floor like fortune-cookie fortunes, each bearing the name of one of the vanished items: wicker love seat, brass birdcage, croquet set, and so forth. I conduct my rounds in mournful diligence, reordering what can be reordered, sealing off quadrants when I must. At certain times I persuade myself an admirable stasis is attained: My blog abides, adapts, is made worldly by its users. At other moments I feel we three stalk one another: prey and predator that have each come under my roof, my own role unknown as yet. It is then I think I hear the blog ticking like a bomb.

*

O jaw dont ever leave us again like that u scared me so bad im shaking all over the place cant u see you’ve got responsive abilities now especially 2 me yr number 1 fan justiny

*

I decided I ought to take a week away from my blog, to absent myself from the site of creation, therefore to allow the inhabitants dwelling there to regulate themselves. It is an egalitarian space I have made, with its own social ecologies, and it would right itself, I was certain. When I returned I found someone had set ablaze the guest book, as well as the burnished ebony Bible stand on which the guest book had stood. The blaze singed the plaster scrollwork ceiling, soot and ash from the pyre forming a kind of rude tombstone or epitaph to itself, like the remains of a Klansman’s torched cross or the horrendous skeleton of a lynching tree. I hadn’t the heart to repair the damage to it and instead sealed the alcove where the guest book and Bible stand had been placed, and now though the blog has innumerable rooms and no one would miss one little nook or alcove, I feel it as a missing limb, a deletion imposed on me by forces malign, a first mortal blow.

*

Dear jaw be strong you cant let the haters get you down yr blog is a very fine blog with two cats in the yard now everything is easy cuz of u also try imagining a place where its always safe and warm come in you said ill give you shelter from the storm xo justiny

*

A descreator, a desecraptor, a desacritter—why such difficlutties spelling the word?—has violated the hallowed corridors of my sanctum. I found his words slathered in dripping red bold graffitist’s capitals unscrubbable across the raw terra-cotta tile:

I’ll content myself imagining such a soul writhing under its own torments, and not give the defamer even the honor of my rebuke. He’ll have moved on, I assure myself
of this. Shambled off to pick on something his own low size. Still, I see his little haiku as if neon-imprinted on my eyelids’ interior when I shut my eyes to sleep.