Stabs at Happiness (12 page)

For a moment, in the near-delirium of this scene, Pavel thought he saw a halo of flames around the fat man's head.

Then Schultz flung the serpent away from him, mightily, and returned, now docilely enough, satisfied, to the truck.

Pavel wanted the gun near at hand, but he was afraid that if he sat on it, he might accidentally blow off one of his buttocks. Left in his lap, it might do more unpredictable harm. So he put it back under the seat.

“Let's go get a sno-cone,” he said, as he started the engine and shifted into gear.

“Sounds fair,” said Schultz, and he didn't speak again all the way back into town. Rather, he hummed, and tapped his fingers in a manner that kept Pavel nervous, waiting for some further act to which he might have to respond.

It wouldn't do, he decided, just to send Schultz back on the next plane. And from here he couldn't exactly send him to Mars, or wherever Schultz would imagine he wanted to go. But still, he needed to be someplace, and that someplace was not the underground project, where he'd be a security risk and a pain in the ass.

True to his word, Pavel stopped and bought Schultz a sno-cone, almond flavored, and managed to consume one himself as he drove out to Madame Rosa's, where he might be able to bunk Schultz for a few days.

It was a big house, long and low, and Pavel took the ignition key and his gun up to the front door, leaving Schultz in the passenger seat, finishing his sno-cone, trying to get every last bit of syrup from the folded paper, sticking out his big strong bovine tongue.

A Hispanic girl, young and skinny, answered the door with ill will, looking tired, saying, “What are you doing here?” She was adorned with an interesting necklace, but it wasn't made of any teeth.

It looked like a ranchero he'd seen once in a cheap vampire movie. In fact, it was almost certainly the same place.

“My friend needs a place to board for a couple of days. Top dollar. Madame Rosa has dealt with our account before.”

“Yeah, well, we're not working right now.”

“Why not?”

“We're on strike,” she said, and then clarified, with less spite, “We're all sick.”

“That's okay,” Pavel said. “Do you have any drugs you could give him? You know, to relax him. He's been working too hard.”

“Just a place to rest? That's all?”

“Right. Someplace quiet and secure.”

“We could put him in the dungeon,” she said, friendlier still, thinking it over, and Pavel agreed, “That'd be great.”

She laughed, and Pavel went and fetched Schultz, who cooperated but looked a little bit as if he was thinking of going off on another interplanetary jag pretty soon. That was okay, Pavel thought. They'd know how to handle him.

All the long ride back out to the project, he knew he'd done the right thing. They could come and get Schultz anytime they wanted. He'd be safe there. It was better than locking him in a bathroom somewhere, which had been his alternate plan.

So now he drove, listening to that same country station, going past the Arco sign, hearing that same slow song about revenge. Steel guitar, a Southern accent, accusations of misconduct and the bad consequence foretold. Yeah.

When he went down, the scientists asked him, “Where is he?” and he shook his head and said, “It was the wrong Schultz.” They realized they weren't going to hear more.

In the showers, he got a big surprise: someone had wheeled in metal carts of dead bodies, just piled them up, unbelievably pale and violet-tinged, shaved bald—and then Pavel saw that they were crash dummies, they looked so real they'd given him a scare. Why had they brought them in here? And why today, of all days?

They must have had their reasons, he supposed, forgetting about it as the water began to fall down on him from high above, splashing off his body onto the turquoise tiles.

S
HE DOESN'T WANT
to have any problems. She doesn't want any trouble. She doesn't want anyone following her around.

She thinks you have to be ready for trouble all the time. Walking across some bridge, she looks at the cars, the faces and hands visible through tinted glass. The sky is low, reflecting the water, which is green and gray, dark green with nodal lines bone and ash in shards of breaking light.

Her hair is red. It's not a natural shade. Her boyfriend likes it. She looks good. She's in his bathroom for a few moments. It's a dangerous bathroom. Her face lingers in his mirror, as a quintuplet after-image. She puts on some blush. She likes to look different to herself, or to those other people—it's better than being so indifferent all the time.

And Billy just plays the same beat over and over on the piano: he's thinking about it real hard, making it more and then less staccato, varying an emphasis here and there. Frowning, he has pale, translucent skin… to such a point that sometimes he seems to be fading away. He hasn't combed his hair.

She is listening to him play. The music makes her hungry. The only thing she's had to eat today was one of those plastic things of yogurt. She doesn't know what flavor. Jukeberry or tigerberry, martian berry, david or da vinci berry, smite thine enemy berry or berry in your head. Fig berry, vagina berry, love me tenderberry love me not. It was red.

Sometimes she wishes she was an animal, though she understands that animals have their problems too. She's gotten sort of addicted to having sex with Billy lately. It isn't just fucking. That's the problem. It's almost everything he does. If he finds out she likes some of his music he'll stop playing it so much. He sticks his penis in her yogurt then gets distracted by some drumbeat in traffic or the flush of a toilet somewhere.

Billy takes no responsibility for other people's actions. He's got enough to worry about as it is. This piano has some broken keys. In the middle octave he can't play D-natural or A-flat. He's learning to live with this. But he's not perfect. His fingers forget.

She likes to sleep alone. She wants to be in her own bed, in her own room. She doesn't want to be disturbed by foreign bodies in the dark. She dreams about being captured and enslaved by barbarians, tied naked in front of a crowd. There are ziggurats and pyramids and earth-mounds here. She gasps when she is touched out of the sky.

Another time it must be afternoon already and she needs to take a bath and wash her hair. She looks at the color as it hangs there, stringy, wet, dripping on the nape of her pale neck. She's itchy. She takes a long time shaving her armpits. The remainder of her pale skin is smooth and sleek.

She puts on makeup while listening to a record. The sound is all blurred. She can't tell if someone's singing or not. It's good to have makeup on. It makes her feel different. She's got kind of a headache. There's a white tablet for that. She puts on more eyeliner in slow motion listening to the same song five times in a row.

She calls up her friend Joolie, and they talk for an hour and a half. Then, tired of all of Joolie's problems, she says I've got to go and puts on violet tights under a miniskirt. The violet matches her eyes or something. She goes outside. The day is slowly flashing and brown. She can't stay inside all day. It makes her feel like she's in jail. She's never been in jail.

She doesn't mind getting wet. The rain is
white
and
silvery
and
clear
. It doesn't last. She's indifferent to the stares she gets. She notices some of them. She wants to get some stares. The light changes and she crosses the street. She looks at her reflection in the skin of a dark green car's hood. She doesn't know herself there.

The sky is low and filled with silent, slowly crawling shapes. There are supposed to be planets on the other side of this sky. She puts a throat lozenge in her mouth and feels it start to melt and numb her tongue. Taste buds are stupid, she thinks. She doesn't want to worry about what flavor's coming next.

Billy doesn't want to do all these dishes in the sink, but he will because somebody has to. He can't remember eating off any of these plates. Did they eat something red? Now it's turning brown in an evil glaze. He's always hated this spoon. The piano is on his mind.

Billy has had some big arguments about it with his friends. They don't properly appreciate the piano as an instrument. They think he should play something else, something he could fold into a briefcase and carry around with him in cars. Billy wants a piano made entirely of glass, with glass shards vibrating on the strings. He imagines a shimmering rainbow of sound. He wants a piano made of bronze, with the sonority of an ancient bell. He wants to slacken the tension on the strings and use glass rods to find his notes like playing a bottleneck guitar. He wants a piano with water in it, so that each note struck will cause a different tone-color splash. He wants a big piano with a circular keyboard: he'd sit in the center like a pilot—if needed he could grow more arms.

The sky is raining like an actress weeping big white tears from a big face full of emotion. Yes, it's all so sad. Big white tears flash in the wet brown day. The face just gets bigger and bigger, closer all the time. The tears sizzle on the sidewalk and turn to steam.

She sees a creature down on all fours crawling around. She avoids it but it looks at her. It's all backwards somehow. Its face has been switched with its ass. Is that pain in its eyes? Exultation? The asshole gapes and shows the strangest shades of red and pink and wet magenta when you gaze inside.

She shows up at Billy's. The buzzer doesn't work. The elevator does, though it takes her to a different number floor at first. The geometric pattern of the rug doesn't look the same. She knocks on his door. But he doesn't answer. The dark brown door opens, mysteriously, and she goes inside. There's the piano, in shadows. There's the phony owl. Where is Billy? Hey, man, where are you? She looks in the refrigerator.

In the bathroom, he's turning to jelly. The piano starts to vibrate. She looks over at it and wonders how you turn it off. She goes into the bathroom, with a knife. The shower curtain scares her.

She sees something and doesn't know what it is. It's breathing, red, alive. It's like a baby with the juice still on but it isn't a baby. It isn't pretty. It opens one of its mouths – if those are mouths – and extends some kind of half-formed tentacle or arm.

She sits down on the closed toilet seat and tries to understand. She doesn't understand. A knife flies around like some little bird.

M
Y DAD GOT ME
drunk when I was fourteen, not too long after my birthday, and I have a scar on my forehead as a result. He and my mother had, at that time, been divorced for maybe three years. The reason for the divorce was his incorrigible womanizing, or unfaithfulness, and this gave him a certain illicit glamour in my eyes.

That night he took me out to eat with him at a Chinese restaurant called Hung Far Low, which was located in a bad part of downtown Portland, before the rebuilding and gentrification. You had to go upstairs to find the restaurant, and I liked the atmosphere there. My father, who had a certain charisma, with his slicked-back Brylcreem hair, wisecracking and cocky, flirted with waitresses everywhere; just by his manner, he would seem to pre-suppose that there was some interesting unanswered question in the air. That night for a reason I've forgotten he wanted me to taste alcohol. It was sort of a joke. The waitress went along.

When asked what I wanted to drink, I very coolly said, “A margarita,” and just this, my choice, the fact that I had a ready choice, amused my father and the waitress no end. The margarita tasted wonderful to me. I hid my pleasure, absorbed in acting as if I did this all the time. I think I had four of them before we left. I have no idea how much bourbon my father put away.

Out in the car, we were conspiratorially pleased with the situation, and whatever we said to each other seemed very funny at the time. As he drove me home, however, a change came over him, and my father sped up, really flooring it along a straight stretch on Stark Street, turning to say to me, with a mean smile, “Want me to slow down? Am I going too fast?” I wouldn't reply to him, and I was angry at the stupid attempt to scare me. He kept asking me if I wanted him to slow down and although I put my hands against the dash I wouldn't give in, I wouldn't say a word. I was furious, and he was in turn furious with me. Nothing I did was ever enough to prove myself to him. He was competitive, and if for instance I grew taller than him and was a more natural, easier star at sports than he had ever been, back in North Dakota – why, then the arena of endeavor would be changed, and we would move on to whether I was tough enough in fights, if I was a man who could defend himself, or if I was a good worker willing to start at the bottom, etcetera. He hated me, I thought, and I was enraged at this—though I worshipped him, in some ways.

He couldn't stop the car in time. He slammed on the brakes, but the vehicle in front of us loomed up, I knew we weren't going to make it, just some dark car stopped at a red light, waiting for us.

I don't recall the actual impact, though later on I would have bad dreams about it that would jerk me awake. The next thing I knew, my father was looking at me with the dumbest fucking look on his face, blood on his forehead and chin.

“What happened, Joe? What happened?”

It was like a bad actor pretending to be drunk, and I despised him. I glanced up where my own head had met the windshield: there was a round, shattery hole. Blood was collecting in my lap. I realized my head had caused the hole. Some people had come out of their houses. Absurdly, someone told me to put my head between my knees. I was calm and composed. I had no fear. I was glad to see the policeman, professionally passing through my field of vision, in no hurry, no emotion whatsoever visible on his face. An ambulance came and took me away. I asked the attendant in back how many stitches he thought I would have.