Rats Saw God (19 page)

“Toby! What's up, man? You're freaking.”

“He's dead. They're saying it on the radio. He's dead.”

“Who's dead?”

Toby turned to face me. His eyes had watered up. “Kurt Cobain is dead. He blew his own head off.”

By lunch the whole school knew. In the parking lot everyone rolled down their windows and blasted the station that was playing nothing but Nirvana. I sat in the El C by myself. Toby was staggering from car to car. Eventually he approached mine.

“We're having a wake on the beach tonight. You'll see the fire.”

•   •   •

That night I could see the fire from my bedroom window. I slipped my
In Utero
CD in my Discman and made my way toward the light. There were nearly fifty of us by the time I got there. As I made my way into the circle I heard someone saying that she thought Kurt Cobain was a prophet and that he had died for our sins. Then this white guy with really skanky dreadlocks said that he thought it was set up to look like a suicide, but that the government wanted him dead because he had too much power. I turned my Discman all the way up and stared away from the fire out into the ocean. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Toby. He looked ghoulish. His pupils were black nickels, and I couldn't tell if he recognized me. He handed me the joint that was in his hand. I pushed my earphones forward so I could hear him speak.

“You know what he said in his note?” I shook my head no. “He quoted that song, ‘It's better to burn out than to fade away.' That's so true, man. So true.”

I pushed the earphones back. In my ears I heard the words,
“I'm not like them, but I can pretend.” I handed the joint back to Toby. He didn't notice I hadn't taken a hit.

On the way back to my house I threw the CD as far out into the Pacific as I could.

A good portion of my next paycheck from the Cineplex went toward paying off the long distance charges Dub and I racked up over the Christmas holidays. She picked me up at the airport when I returned from San Diego and drove me straight home. The astronaut, thankfully, was at work. I would try to avoid an introduction scene for as long as I could. I carried my bags up to my bedroom and Dub followed. She surveyed the monastic austerity of my bedroom's decor.

“I really like what you've done in here, Sport. It's just as I would have—”

I didn't let her finish. For three hours on the plane I'd anticipated this moment. Wrapping one arm around her waist and one hand around her neck, I think I actually—though without forethought—growled when I first kissed her. I backed her up to the bed, and when her feet could retreat no farther, she fell back with me on top of her.

“Miss me much?” she asked.

I reached down and began untucking her shirt.

“Hey, buddy,” Dub began. Her lips were touching mine as she spoke. “We're heading into new territory here.”

“I know.” It was
completely
new for me. Dub and I had only kissed. Sure we had ground our hips together until I feared the friction would ignite our blue jeans, or worse, cause
elephantiasis, but I had never ventured inside girls' clothing before. I wasn't quite sure how it operated. I felt like a slave, though, to the ghosts of all men who had gone forth before me and multiplied. This was chemistry, conditioning, history, instinct. I had no idea where I was going, but I was in a big hurry to get there. Left with no choice but to follow the compass needle in my boxers, I slid a hand over my girlfriend's stomach until I cupped the satiny fabric covering her right breast. I heard her inhale through wet teeth. Taking this as a positive sign, I squeezed. I began moving my thumb back and forth across her nipple like a windshield wiper. It firmed with each swipe. Dub gripped my blue jean pockets, and I sent my tongue on a journey to her ear and then down her neck.

Laundry room… predivorce… talking to Mom… watching her fold clothes… there had been a bra. Think, Steve, think. Ah yes. I remember now. A clasp, maybe two, in the back.

I slid my hand under Dub and began tracing the fabric of her bra. When I got to her spine, I intensified my search for any bump or node that would identify the hook mechanism. I tried to disguise my fumbling as some sort of exotic foreplay involving the lower shoulder blade erogenous zone.

“Want some help?”

“Please,” I answered pitifully.

She brought her hands up to the front of her bra, to a spot between her breasts, and with a swift twist (I should have asked her to demonstrate this slowly), she unhooked herself. Quickly we were out of our shirts, naked from the waist up, and pressed against each other. Dub rolled me over on my back and straddled me. She kissed my forehead first, then my
lips, then my neck. In the process her nipples skimmed along the surface of my chest, and I luxuriated in the unearthly smoothness of female breasts against my skin. I felt a dangerous tingle, but the sound of the automatic garage door opening interrupted any worries I had of embarrassing myself.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” I said, as I rolled out from under Dub and onto the floor.

Dub calmly began putting her clothes back on. My first attempt to do the same resulted in the label of my T-shirt serving as a bib for my Adam's apple.

“Try that again,” Dub said, running her fingers through her tangled hair.

I turned my T-shirt right side out and remembered to keep the label in back as I refrocked. I could hear the astronaut coming up the stairs. I wanted to throw up. Dub sat down at my desk just as the astronaut entered the room.

“We just got here. We just got back from the airport,” I said without being asked.

“Hello, Wanda,” he said. “How have you been?”

“Good.”

“Steve, I need to see you after Wanda leaves. I'll be in my office.” Then he left.

Dub mouthed “uh-oh” from across the room. “I probably ought to get out of here,” she said as she came toward me. “It didn't sound like he was willing to wait too long for that little chat.”

“I keep forgetting that you were friends with Sarah.”

“Still am.”

“So you've been over before?”

“Plenty of times. We never really hung out here, though. It's not exactly fun central, you know? You suppose he wants to talk to you about that?” She pointed to my bed. Waves of comforter leapt out from a human-sized indention in the middle. I shrugged. Dub kissed me quickly on the cheek. “Hang tough. It was worth it for me.” She showed herself the way out. I collected myself before entering the astronaut's sanctum.

“You wanted to see me?”

The astronaut sat at his desk, facing away from me. He wore his reading glasses. Stacks of documents bound in red and green pressboard were spread out in front of him. I knew, without looking, they were classified reports. Before he went to bed, the astronaut would lock them in the poorly disguised end table/safe. He closed the report in his hands, but he didn't turn around.

“I don't want you upstairs with Wanda—or any girl for that matter—when I'm not home.”

“We weren't doing anything.”

“That's not the issue. There's no reason for her to be upstairs with you. It's not appropriate. That's my final decision.”

And that, I believe, was our longest conversation in a year.

Allison and I have seen each other every day this week. I haven't invited her to join me at Cap's yet. I don't know that I will. I need these three hours a day—to write, to screw my head on straight, to drink coffee and pretend I'm in college.

I think DeMouy is on to us. This, despite our scant acknowledgment of each other's existence at school. Allison says he asks
how I'm doing when he talks to her. He never asks me how she's doing, but I can't say this offends me.

I understand now why Allison is so preoccupied with making money. After a romantic night on the beach cuddling by a driftwood fire, she explained her current living situation. (I took great pains, incidentally, to make the fire appear unplanned, though I had, earlier in the day, gathered the wood, soaked it in lighter fluid, and surrounded it with skull-sized boulders.)

Allison was eleven and living in a house not far down the beach from where we sat. She was waiting impatiently for her brother and mother to return from grocery shopping. She had won the fifty-meter backstroke in a swim meet that morning, and she couldn't wait to show off her ribbon. (She leaned away from me at this point and stared out into the ocean.) She said the phone rang, and she answered it. Her uncle asked to speak to her father. Her father got on the phone, and Allison watched as his knees buckled and he collapsed against the refrigerator. He dropped the phone, and, unsure of what she could do, eleven-year-old Allison ran to help. Her father wrapped her in his arms and rocked her for half an hour before telling her that her mother and brother had been killed by a drunk driver on the drive home from the store.

When we go to my house, Allison makes me detour around the crash site. She says she still has nightmares, but other than that, she's a mentally healthy, if not constantly happy, girl. Her father, on the other hand, has never fully recovered. He tried going back to work for his defense contractor employer, but after months of missing deadlines, disappearing from the office, and,
finally, intentionally sabotaging his company's latest mass death weapon, he was fired. The two of them lived for a couple years on insurance money and savings, but after that income had been depleted, they had to sell the house. Allison says she hopes she's making enough money to support her father by the time that money runs out. In the meantime, she's been the housekeeper, gardener, cook, and sole companion to him.

“I've nearly convinced him to join a therapy group for people who have lost their spouses,” she tells me before laying her head across my lap and staring into the radiant embers of the fire. Sitting there, I remembered a conversation I'd had with Dub. She had tried to convince me that, when you're young, you're more compatible with people different from you. For the first time, I thought she might be right about that.

Allison thinks her father would consider any boy she brought home a threat, and I don't care to push it. I'm happy with the way things are. I told Allison the story of my messy life. After hearing about hers, mine didn't seem worthy of secrecy.

Months passed without a member of GOD mentioning the need for a new sponsor. The fact that the school didn't recognize our existence had only heightened our smugness.

“We're mainland China, man,” Doug insisted to no one in particular and everyone in general, “the baddest boys on the block, recognized or not.”

“Everyone—except Taiwan maybe—has recognized the Peoples' Republic of China by now,” Matt mentioned.

“Spare me the details, Ivy!” Doug said scornfully.

That was before the yearbook staff announced group photos for the yearbook would be taken the week before spring break. Suddenly Doug was anxious for the sanctions to end. Five hundred dollars, after all, rode on our inclusion. All GODists had taken to eating under the only tree on the school grounds that wasn't a staked sapling—a sycamore in the courtyard between the English and art wings. We were on a split lunch schedule, so I saw only half the membership.