Rose of No Man's Land (25 page)

Afterward we lay around on the plastic grass. We looked up at the wide bowl of night, squinting for stars, but you can’t see any above Route 1. We’d traded stars for the tall neon sculptures that advertise the restaurants. I say who cares. It’s not like we can make the stars extinct. The stars are the last bit of nature we can’t fuck up; we only fuck it up for ourselves, stacking lights on top of lights ’til we blot out the sky. I think it’s an okay trade-off. I like the neon, and I like knowing the stars are up there too. Shining down on some more-country part of the world. Instead of stars we lay beneath the general glow of Route 1, the combination of all the neon on the strip rising into an orangey glow of sky, like a forever sort of sunset or gust of pollution. The round, white lights shooting up from the Astroturf. Cars
on the highway added extra beams into the mix, like zooming disco balls they sped by, strobing. The light seemed alive with a pulse like the one inside my body, my new pulse, or perhaps it had always been there and the crystal had highlighted it.

It’s Good We Both Wore Our Pajamas, I said to Rose. I tugged on a bit of her nightgown, rubbed the fabric between my fingers to hear it scratch. We Could Just Sleep Here At The T-Rex.

Oh, we’re not going to sleep, man
, Rose laughed.
Not for a while. Not on this stuff.

It didn’t feel weird that we had kissed or touched. I felt really okay. I sincerely hoped that it would happen again but I also wasn’t freaking out about it. I was just floating in some plasticky garden of goodness. Rose sat up and opened the backpack. She dumped its contents onto the ground in a clanking mess. The rest of the Yikes, the shimmery drugs in their jewel-bag, the smokes. The picture of Paulie’s cousin and the Polaroids, two of them. I flipped them over. One was Kim. Kim and Rose, side by side on the spiky green.

You Took It, I said.

Yeah, fuck him. Why should he have that? A picture of anyone. I wish I could have taken them all.

There Were More?

Rose nodded.
What are we going to do with all this shit?
She lifted the cell phone. It had rung a ton while we were making out. She hit buttons and saw what we’d missed. Calls from Katie, calls from
XXX.
Calls from Home.
Fuck this phone.
She offered it to me.
Do you want to make any last calls?

Unh-uh.

She pressed the wide, rubbery button on the top, fiddled around and the phone went dead.
I want to bury it
, she said,
but you can’t dig this shit up.
Her nails dug at the turf. She stood up and walked down the slope to the windmill. When the course was turned on, the windmill twirled, its blades blocking the golf ball hole as they spun down. The windmill was all about timing. Crouching, Rose chucked the cell phone deep inside.
Okay, we got rid of that
, she stomped back up the slope.
This?
She held up the redheaded dancer, light bouncing off the glass.
Your turn.
I walked it to the shrubbery edging the path, tough little bushes of dark green leaves. They seemed almost as phony as the Astroturf but when I dug beneath the woodchips I felt real dirt, damp roots twining deep.

It’s Hard To Tell What’s Real In This Place, I called to Rose.

That gnome? Not real.

I pulled the velvety stand from the back of the frame and set the picture down beside the red-capped gnome. I arranged branches of bush around it, the glossy leaves framing the frame. I pushed woodchips up around its edges. The light found the dancer — she looked like a miniature girl sashaying through an enchanted, gnome-ridden bush-forest. Rose liked it. Rose was cracking up. She lit up another cigarette and I huddled beside her, received the burning treat each time she passed it my way. I rated smoking second under kissing as best activity ever. I was glad I’d waited to try it, now I had a new thing to get into. Another new thing. I liked how the smoke totally invaded
your body. It swelled your insides, then burst out in a dramatic escape. It was like eating, only better. I wanted to never eat again, never sleep, only smoke and think great thoughts and kiss Rose. I passed the cigarette back to her and took a hit off the Yikes. We talked. We talked about her mom and how sad she was about Irene and maybe just about life in general. How maybe when you’re depressed for long enough it just damages your brain, makes you regular sad all the time. We talked about my mom and how sick she wasn’t and was. And all the talking and thinking about her made me sad in this way I hadn’t felt before. Not sad like old-people sad, but some cousin of that emotion. I thought about Ma lying day in, day out on the saggy couch. Ma had a life, just like I did. That was her life. A whole life spent on a couch. I had to stop thinking about it. It was making my chest feel like a tight plank. We talked about our dads instead. Our nowhere dads. There wasn’t much to talk about. We talked about Paulie’s ruined arms. They were easier to think about than moms. We talked about Paulie’s stomach and the fetal alien probably living inside it. About how a guy turns into a Paulie rather than a more gently offensive loser like Donnie, or a more normal guy like you might see on TV.

No mom
, Rose offered.
Right?

Too Obvious, I said. That’s Like, People Could Say We’re Like This — I waved around a bottle of Yikes in my one hand and the end of the cigarette in my other — Because We Got No Dads.

Rose shrugged.
Maybe we are. Who cares.
I cared. I didn’t like thinking of my general personality being the
result of a mistake. Ma’s mistake of marrying him or his mistake of leaving, my mistake of being born from their mistaken relationship.

It’s not like that
, Rose shook her head and drank from the Yikes.
It’s just like — life is there to mess with you. You just have to relax and let it mess you up. You can’t resist it. You turn crazier when you try to stop it.
I thought about Kristy and her positive-thinking spells and how tense they made her. And Ma’s stupid routine, always coming up with a new germ infestation. Maybe if she was just honest and said, Yeah I can’t deal with the world, I want to lie around and watch Dr. Phil, maybe she’d be happier.

And really, any way the world fucks with you, you probably could have seen it coming if you just thought about it. My ma is crazy about Irene being in the war, but Irene was in the army when she met her. Why did she go on a date with an army person? My mom
, she explained,
protests stuff. She brought me up to New Hampshire to try to shut down a nuclear power plant when I was like four. She’s got bumper stickers all over the car about peace and love, and then she goes on a date with an army person and gets depressed when she goes to war.

Whoa, I said. Totally. It seemed like an extra amount of air was getting into my lungs. My nostrils felt huge, the back of my throat wide and dry, no matter how much Yikes I drank. A bitter ooze crept down from my nose like an underground creek, dripping a crumby sludge of leftover drugs over my tonsils. It was like all you had to do was snort a little bit of crystal and it created a magical spring that kept leeching the drug into your system. I snorted and
swallowed. Don’t You Want To Stay Here Forever? I asked. Rose passed me the last of the cigarette. The whole cigarette thing was fine if I didn’t think about it too much. The smoking process was excellent, but if I smelled my fingers or thought about my breath I become obsessively grossed out with myself. I held the smoldering butt between my thumb and pointer finger, making an Okay sign like I’d seen Rose do earlier. I flicked it. It shot from my hand like a tiny firework, arcing orange into the bushes.

Nah, let’s go walk around.
Rose hopped up.
Let’s go into all the restaurants.
She was off and headed toward the chain-link fence, the backpack slumped on the ground for me to carry. I stuffed the items we were keeping back into the pouch of it, the Polaroids and the drugs and the money. We had three more bottles of Yikes left, and I don’t know how many cigarettes. I strapped the backpack to my shoulders and hiked down the Astroturf to where Rose was already scaling the fence. I was sort of sad to be leaving our special golf garden. I wondered if the making-out was something that could only ever happen there, in the plastic hush, among the cartoon statues. A strange otherworld, like Never-Neverland where kids don’t grow up. A world where a couple of girls could make out with each other and nothing tragic or stupid would happen, not even a minor conversation to take it back or trash it, nothing at all except that magical ignition of internal sparks. We’d stepped into a fairy ring where upside-down was rightside-up. I didn’t want to leave it. I felt a sudden physical plummet, somewhere inside my chest. It was a drop that took me off balance and made my body feel noodley. Paulie had talked
about a crash. It had made Kim Porciatti want to kill herself. Had something crashed in me? It felt like a car hitting the brakes behind my heart.

Yoo-hoo!
Rose was on the other side of the fence, her sneaks poked through the links, waving her arms at me. The backlight of the rushing highway shone through her nightgown and I could see the outline of her body beneath it, like a shadow puppet. She called to me,
Don’t bother with the dinosaur
, she said.
It doesn’t help. Just hop the fence.
The dinosaur, our guardian, protector of the magical land of nighttime Astroturf. I knocked its orange back with my knuckles and heard the sound roll around its hollow insides. I could hop a fence no problem. Rose clambered down to the ground and I soon dropped beside her. We looked up at the T-Rex, its mouth in a forever roar, angry at the cars below, at the giant pagoda across the street.

Bye, Guy, I said. I gave a little wave. We turned to cross the highway and I knew it had our back.

If you have nothing to do and nowhere to be and you’re just hanging around on drugs, Route 1 is a seriously festive place to be. All the Vegasy restaurants. The Chinese restaurant with the river, the steak house with a neon cactus as tall as Monster Paulie’s apartment building and a herd of fake cows grazing out front of the building, all wooden like a ranch in Texas. The Mexican restaurant built like a shabby shack strung all around with Christmas lights and blaring Mexican guitar music you can hear as you pass by the parking lot. The Italian place with a replica of that crooked tower sticking out of its roof, all wonked. Even the crappy sausage sandwich joint where you order at the window has an enormous neon sign advertising it. It’s about fifteen times the size of the sausage joint itself, which looks
like a food trailer from a traveling carnival. But I guess if you’re going to compete in the Route 1 restaurant world, you need to have a lot of neon. We went to the Mexican restaurant first, because it was close enough for us to hear the yodeling Mexican singer. The romantic swells of his voice bobbed in the air like bubbles. We walked alongside the road, the cars careening close. We walked one in front of the other, me leading. I didn’t like not being able to see Rose. I felt that falling sensation in my body again. It left my legs trembling. I guess it was maybe time to eat, but the thought seemed lousy. I didn’t have an appetite. The Mexican restaurant was shrouded in a hazy glow from all the Christmas lights; I could see the colored halo shining up from the dark like the light of a UFO crashed down in an empty lot.

What Should We Do? I asked Rose. The place was squat before us. Shaggy piñatas dangled from the awning. Inside I saw waiters wearing sombreros trimmed with little pompoms.

Let’s go inside
, she said.
You want to eat some chips?

Yeah, I nodded. Now I had a focus. Chips would save me.

You want real food? We can get tacos or something. I have a bunch of money still.

I thought of tacos, stuffed with blobs of white cream and globules of crumbly meat. My stomach lurched, then sealed itself off. Even chips seemed brittle and greasy if I thought about it too much. I wouldn’t think, I’d just eat. We pushed into the place and were overwhelmed by the music. The place was a real party on the inside. They had it all dressed up like Friday night in Mexico. Striped blankets
swagged from the splintery roof beams, spinning ceiling fans tossing their fringed ends around above our heads. Mexican words were painted on the walls, beside murals of Mexican women dancing around in fluffy dresses. The walls themselves had been painted to look old and kind of dirty. They were yellow with faint brown streaks and creases. At the bar a bunch of jocks watched sports on a TV and drank jellybean-colored drinks in margarita glasses the size of punch bowls.

Two?
A waitress asked us. We nodded dumbly, were led to a wooden table in the middle of everything. Plastic donkeys smiled with big teeth on a shelf above our heads. The salt and pepper shakers were Mexican beer bottles. A man quickly placed two giant plastic cups of water onto our table, followed by a basket of chips and a dish of chunky salsa.

Yes!
Rose cheered. She grabbed a chip and started poking it into the salsa. I waited for her to eat it, but she didn’t. She was just piling stuff onto it, a juicy tower of tomato, onion, cucumber. When it toppled onto the table, she started over.
This place is great but I’m going to get bored of it real fast. In fact, I’m already bored. I hate that about speed. Sometimes, I just have an idea and then I’m bored with it before I even do it.

Aren’t You Going To Eat? I asked. I gulped some water. It felt like medicine, going down. My whole body went
aaaaahhh.

No
, Rose said,
but you should. You look lousy.

My hand went up to my face, as if
lousy
was a bumpy, tangible object sitting on my cheek. I Do? Rose didn’t look so hot herself. Her skin looked a little glow-in-the-dark,
and there were red blotches on her face that looked scaly. The blotches ran down her arms, too. Her arms looked webbed with some awful red flush. Beneath the bright lights of the restaurant, Rose was looking
X-Files.
There’s Something Wrong With Your Arms, I said.