Nothing Real Volume 1 (6 page)

“Have you heard this?” Val asks as though everyone has been listening to it these days. “The Watson Family? Serious fiddle music.” He taps his foot and flaps his arms. His biceps extend now just below the sleeve of his T-shirt. “These guys are unfuckingbelievable.”

He hears something she never will: virtuosity on the fiddle, the texture and beauty of it, carrying some fiddle-specific message. It is as though he were another species completely, hearing on another frequency, with capabilities as foreign to her as that of, say, an electric eel. As she listens to the amusical vibrations of the fiddler, she can think only of dirt, the black earth of the song. She should tell him this and make him love her for it, for her way with language—for her poetic need to see and feel everything colliding with its own name, substance and description clashing within syllables, her mind carried on the waves of these collisions. But she can't speak. And she fears, suddenly, that what she thinks is a cliché. Of course folk music would sound like dirt. It is a joke her own mind is playing at her expense. She is showing herself her own stupidity, setting herself up for Val's judgment. She is certain of his ancient boredom with what she has to say. It was how he became a drunk and got fat in the first place: pervasive boredom.

Everything in the room suddenly has an odor and a reflection. She feels she is looking into a mirror and sees everything reflected except herself. Val is enjoying himself, rippling through the music and through time, while she sits on the side of his futon, outside of both, too far to reach over and kiss him and begin the fucking that she knows will be the end of them. She waits there for him to kiss her, to feel the artificiality, the semblance of affection on her lips. Love has a smell and a taste to it that her body does not exude. She can't fool him, but suddenly knows she does not want to. Let him have her. He deserves her. She wants to throw herself at him, like throwing herself
under a bus, or the body as a bomb. Let him have her. He's why she's lost herself anyway, and he deserves the shell of her now.

Back when she wanted him, he'd turned on the TV and took out the tall, blue bong, and smoked himself into oblivion. Her yearning filled the room, and he'd turned from her—to Kim Craft, to
Lancaster
and the garish pseudocommentary of a woman writhing on satiny sheets with an ass no one of either sex could look away from.

She knows he will feel her numbness when he enters her, that the sex will be mechanical, that she cannot be moved. She wants him to want her, though, to move toward her, so she can give him this back. She wants him to know this is how he's made her feel, this nothingness. He could keep playing her this noise, this whinnying. She could always pretend to like what he likes, to know what he knows, but now he will have to suffer the consequences.

I used to imagine what my life would be like if my father were gone. Dead, actually. I'd think about it for hours. That's what I told Dr. Mick when I wound up here, and he began asking a lot of crap: about my relationship with my dad; about when I started to unravel, to feel like shit all the time, and not only half the time, like a normal kid. He wanted the whole timetable laid out, as if knowing how the thing began would be the key to its ending. But it wasn't a time line at all, not a direct route or even a winding path in a forest of weed and Percocet. Mine was a fall. And you don't get back up out of a hole by staring at where you came from. You have to claw your way out. You have to hang on tight every fucking second, and not ever slip.

I told Dr. Mick this, and he said it was a good analogy. Psych points.

That's how you make it out of here.

I don't think Dr. Mick got the extent of my dwelling on the death of my dad. How this was an everyday, fairly time-consuming obsession
of mine. I put details into this story—heart attack with feet on desk, car crash on 684 in the far left lane, a pileup of mangled Porches and BMWs.

I imagined Mom silent at first, then a choked sob, almost a bellow emitting from her contorted mouth. And me. Sometimes I'd imagine myself cool-eyed and observant, standing around, watching other people freak. But other times, I'd be on my knees, thinking how permanent it all was. How now that he was dead, we'd both have to be assholes for all eternity.

It got so bad, this morbid fantasizing, that when my dad actually did get home from work I'd feel a slight twinge of surprise, as if he'd actually been resurrected, and had not just pulled his silver Porsche into the driveway, wheels on the gravel audible from the kitchen where I sat with my feet up on the table. But that was only until I'd hear his step on the wooden stair. Then I'd snap to and sit up straight, like I was about to do something important—study precalculus, or take out the trash.

When I thought about him dead, I'd do the funeral routine in my head first, and then the emptiness of the days that would follow, Mom's grief an echo filling the house.

I'd think about the work I'd do around the house, the people I'd have to deal with.

I would be doing actual stuff, chores and whatnot, but in my head I'd be thinking how it was all just up to me now. I'd stomp around in my heavy boots, walk around the back of the house, knocking down the thick icicles that hung glistening from the roof. They were heavy
as hell, and believe me, it'd be all over if one of those ice daggers nailed me, but I'd make the danger of it worse, smacking a few of them at a time, ice crashing in a shower, the sound like glass breaking. I'd whack tree branches with an ax handle, and the ice and snow would fall, some of it going straight down my back, a sheet of blinding white, and I'd pretend all of this was work, that it served some sort of purpose, and that I wasn't bored out of my mind, wasn't outside smoking a fat blunt.

I pretended to myself that these things needed to be done and I was the one to do them.

Sometimes I'd catch Mom watching me out of the upstairs window, her face pale against the green curtains, her brown hair streaked gray. She was still pretty, but in a way that made you think about what she looked like when she was young.

I cut entire weeks of school. Other times, I'd show up without any books or even anything to write with. I didn't go to some blow-off school either. Hamilton High is the kind of place where even sophomores are talking about college, taking PSATs and sweating it.

I lied to May Schwartz about where I went. I said I had the flu or a bitching migraine. She wasn't my girlfriend exactly, but she wasn't nobody. I told her not to come over, that I felt like crap, which was true, but I also wouldn't have been there if she had come by.

Sometimes, I'd spend all day messing around. I'd take the train down to the city. Then I'd take the subway around Manhattan. I knew my way around since we'd lived in the city until I was twelve, until my parents got the effed-up idea I needed a more wholesome
environment. They should have seen May Schwartz the first time we hooked up. Wholesome my ass.

One day, I took the train up to Washington Heights, near Fort Tryon. It was where we used to live when I was a little kid. I hardly remembered it anymore, but walking around there gave me a feeling like being in a dream, like even the ordinary shit I saw was supposed to mean something. I walked around up there, even though it was cold as shit, wind coming off the Hudson, all the trees and bushes looking frozen solid. I wondered which ones grew flowers in the spring, how they survived the brutal layer of ice and snow.

There was a hill with a few little kids sledding with their moms or babysitters, kids too young for school—babies. They were all zipped into their snowsuits, feet out straight, the mom or some young Dominican girl in the back of the sled, and down they'd go, pretty damn fast, snow flying; then the kid would bounce up, stand there like they accomplished something, little baby mountaineers. The grown-ups would drag the sled back up the hill, and sometimes the little kids would flop down in the snow, not moving. I wondered what they thought, lying there in the cold. If they thought about not moving, staying still, maybe forever. I was someone no one noticed, a dude on a bench. Not creepy enough to call attention to myself, being what I was: lost.

I didn't know whether May was drowning me, or I was drowning her, which of us began the downward spiral—only that we were both on it. I knew I needed to help her, but at the same time, she needed to save
me too. I'd look at her as she slept, her hair fanned out behind her, and I'd think how if I could get her out of the room, to go to a movie, or if I could keep the knives and scissors and nail files and paper clips, all sharp things out of her way, then I'd be some sort of hero. I'd stop her from being so scared and depressed or sad, or whatever it was that made her want to cut herself. Anyone who could save someone else must surely be able to save himself.

“Where's your mom?” I asked. May didn't look up from her marble composition notebook.

“Doctor's.”

“How long?”

“No telling. I don't know which it is. Shrink, acupuncturist. Real.”

“She lets some guy stick needles into her?”

“Relieves pain.”

May turned on her side and eyed me. She was a weird-looking chick, that kind of weird you can't stop looking at so you decide it's hot. Straight Asian hair like her mom, but her features were a weird blend of Asian and Jewish. Light brown eyes, juicy lips, perfect skin. She reached over to her nightstand and grabbed a cigarette. I thought that was majorly fucked up since her mom was so sick, but May shrugged. She said she only smoked after we did it. For all I knew that was true, because other than being in her bedroom once or twice a week and seeing her in French class, I barely saw May. For a while, I tried to get her to go places: Sam Bardfield's parties, kegger on the hill, a fucking movie. But May always said no. She said she couldn't be
my real girlfriend because she didn't have enough to say to me, to say to anyone. “I panic when I go to those parties,” she said. “Like there's cotton in my throat, like I can't breathe or speak.” It made me feel bad at first, like I was a fuckhead for sleeping with her and never taking her anywhere. But it was her call. She seemed to enjoy herself up there in her bedroom on the days her mom was out at the doctor. Enjoyed herself a lot, especially for a girl who didn't really like anything else.

At first, that was all the wrong-ass shit I was doing—cutting school, going to May's, smoking weed. I knew I wasn't exactly meeting anyone's expectations, but I still felt mostly numb. I'd think up the stuff about Dad dying, and I'd think up asshole stuff about Dad, and how I'd like to knock that know-it-all look from his smug lawyer face. How I wished he and his triathlon ass would beat it.

I remember being in the goal cage and getting pounded. It was one drive after another. My ribs hurt like a mother. Jake, who was trying to give me some cover, looked like shit. He'd fallen in the first half, eaten dirt, and come up with a big grin on his face, but his lips had started to swell so bad he looked like a camel. I had a pain in the ribs that went straight through my body, so I didn't even know which side had taken the blow. But none of this slowed me down, and that was the weird part. It was like the more I hurt, the more I threw myself at the ball, shot after shot. People were going nuts. We should have been dying, but there I was, making it happen, save after save. After about the twentieth time I dove on the ball, the whole team started smacking my head, just smack, smack, smack, until I couldn't see. Coach finally
called them off so we could finish the damn game. Then it was over.

We won one-nothing, and it was my game. Even the parents were going apeshit. Jay Parker's mother, with her giant fake boobs, was losing it, jumping up and down in her glittery hoody like some deranged forty-eight-year-old cheerleader. Scott and the other forwards spent the last minutes of the game standing around in uniforms that were as clean as when the game started, watching me dive in the mud like they were spectators on their own forward line. May was even there, standing off to the side with Ellen Susstein, and May was doing a little silent dance, with her mouth open and clapping with her hands over her head. Her freakster imitation of being down with the moment.

Then there was Dad. He was standing with his arms crossed, not moving, thin gray strands of hair lifted by the breeze so they stood straight off his head. Dad was the only one standing still, not making eye contact. Rolling back on his heels, his compact body tensed, looking like the former gymnast that he was, like he could spring off his heels and into some sort of backflip. Dad had that focus. He didn't need any running start, or time to think through a move. He was grimacing, and I knew right away what it was. The guy was all choked up. I made him so proud. That made me just about puke in my mouth.

I shook hands with everybody, let everyone pound on me, slap my ass. I wanted to find somewhere to lie down, get May to help me take my shirt off, have her lean over me, her hair across my face, everything about her gentle—her quietness the thing I wanted to tell her I loved, even more than her body. The quietness inside her was the thing I
needed her body to get to.

But she was gone, of course. May couldn't fight her way through the crowd for me. Neither could Dad. They're improbably alike in that way, but her silence was gentleness and his was something else. He stood his ground, and waited for me to come to him.

“Adam.”

“Dad.”

“Some game.”

“I think I'm going to pass out.”

“Now you know what it takes, Adam.”

“What do you mean?”

“To win. It takes everything you've got.” He gave me a quick, minimal-contact man hug and nodded several more times. His nose was a little pink, and his teeth flashed white and straight in his tight smile. That was Dad in a happy moment. A flash of white, tense bodily joy.

I wanted to tell him it wasn't what he thought, that I was dying out there. I didn't know where any of it came from, didn't really want it to ever happen again. If that was winning, I was too tired for it.