The More You Ignore Me (18 page)

Was she documenting the party for the noticeably absent Corn?

Was she employed by some university department to create “fun” montages with wretched soundtracks?

Was she an agent of some kind?

“Why did I agree to do this again?” she sighed, offering no insight as to
whom
she had the agreement with.

Maddening.

Air and foam coughed from the tap.

Rico patted her elbow and offered her a cigarette.

“Because you're my friend?” he said.

Why?

She looked at the cigarette and let her hair fall around her shoulders.

“Trying to quit, finally, so no. Thank you. I really want to get healthy again. I mean, I'm twenty-two, single, and jobless. I can at least not be a stinky cliché. Whatever. Give it.”

He lit it for her.

“So I'm asking all these morons why they're here at this stupid thing, and they're all like ‘For the partaaaaaay!' So dumb.”

Rico became lost in thought.

“Remember when it seemed so radical to wear a
T
-shirt with an iron-on?” he asked.

“No.”

“Yes you do. I remember you had a shirt that said, ‘Mr. Bubble.'”

“That was, like, a reaction against the whole thing, duh.”

“I know, but that means, right, that you remember it.”

“What's your point?”

“I want to make a
T
-shirt that really sums up my entire life philosophy. I want a
T
-shirt that matters.”

He looked very serious.

The plump one frowned.

He had to know that she considered him to be smarter than her, and he had to relish this.

She was trying hard to think.

“Wouldn't that just be white? Like, blank?”

“No,” he said, “I want words on it. I think that in the future there will be lots of
T
-shirts with words on them.”

“Words or could it just be one word?”

“I think I'd prefer a sentence. In the tradition of the slogan.”

They both sat quietly in the evening air as the party began to flood over around them.

I swatted away the cups demanding more beer—couldn't they see I was busy?

“Squirts?” she said, finally.

“With the question mark or no?”

“No, just ‘squirts.'”

He laughed.

I laughed.

I poured beer for everyone.

Life made sense again!

Clarity had returned!

Rico would not worry about Rachil, I thought then, he would squirt! We would all squirt!
T
-shirts would have words on them!

“I think you got it!” he said.

“All right,” she said, unaware of her triumph. “I have to go film some more of these jack***es.”

She launched herself from the bench and pulled her shirt away from her sweaty back before starting off.

I sprayed beer in her direction, laughing to myself, as a young couple with their plastic cups frowned at me.

“Hey,” the plump one yelled out to the couple. “Wanna be famous?”

My elation momentarily thwarted, I ducked out of the way of the camera—what
was
this job she had? Why was I being filmed?

She escorted the couple away from me and began some kind of interview.

Crouched there behind the keg, I pondered her employment.

People who do not like to give their time and energy to a job think of themselves as precious but also damaged, don't you think?

If you value yourself sufficiently, then you know you won't waste time, and so there is no fear of a nine-to-five job.

Now, for example, I love my current task, in part, I know, because I want to love my current task.

I do not want to be a person unhappy in his work, and so I am not.

A strong mind makes for simple choices.

Simple, but not plain.

My job is
just
, and so I am proud of the work I have done—and continue to do—on the blogs.

This woman would clearly never be happy in her work because she didn't (and doesn't still, surely) value herself.

Applying the full force of her mind to a task scares her, and so she always dodges.

Failure is, of course, scary, but so is success.

Any rudimentary analyst could tell you that.

With success comes responsibility, which weak people with no self-worth can't handle, so they invent problems.

People like this plump one, Vita.

And, it must be said, Rico and Nico.

Corn and Chris, if we can compare them in this instance with N/Rico, believe they know who they are.

They have spent sufficient time with their parents, grandparents, and far-off relations, and they have been observant enough to see what each got from whom.

For Corn: his father's peaked upper lip, his grandmother's curly dark hair, his grandfather's smirk, his mother's duplicity.

There is no mystery.

For Rico, two years younger than Corn and of such a dreamy disposition, it was different.

He has never sufficiently known his father, who has had only intermittent contact since the divorce, and this father was replaced, further research has revealed, by a truly bizarre stepfather.

Rico's self has been infused with a cosmic void, unknowable, and thus doubt and weird shame have filled him ever since he was five years old.

Any false start, or hitch in progress, and Rico crumpled.

This is his tragedy, and perhaps why Corn was able to unstring his mind so easily.

Rico looked over at Vita, now slumped in the grass, her shoulders rounded and the hump of her back just before her neck jutted out like a sad bottom lip.

Her parents had clearly retarded her development too.

The couple she had tried to film was fast-walking away, looking scornfully over their shoulders at her, frowning there in the grass.

“Talk to your mother lately?” Rico asked, settling on the grass beside her.

“You don't want to know,” she said, slumping further.

True, he didn't (who would?), but that the cliché retort from her was, in fact, the truth made him burst out laughing.

He was, I suspected, becoming the new Rico.

She smiled weakly at him.

He had a loud laugh, a burst of three tiered “ha”s, celebratory and, at the same time, a bit derisive.

He unleashed it only when he seemed truly confident and free.

“Rico,” she said, leaning in to put her damp arm around his neck, “I love your laugh! I missed it so much when you were . . .''

She stopped.

No one spoke directly of his time in the hospital.

Instead, she kissed him lightly on the cheek and then pulled back, though not quite fully.

She opened her eyes wide and sucked her cheeks in.

Rico and I both tried not to laugh. I surmised that this must be the plump one's “serious face.”

She obviously didn't realize everyone could see how she sucked her cheeks in on purpose, that she looked like some sort of absurd German fashion fish, not, as she must have hoped, like an empathetic compatriot.

“I love you,” she said. “For real.”

She pouted out her lips.

I guffawed loudly.

“I just want to make sure you know that. I mean,
really
know that . . .”

“I do,” he said and pulled her close for another hug.

Over her shoulder, to no one, he had to exercise massive restraint to keep from rolling his eyes.

I rolled mine in solidarity with him.

Love is a force that gives us meaning, isn't that it, dear readers?

No.

That isn't quite right.

Love is a feeling that gives us a fantasy of meaning?

No.

That isn't it either.

Love is an excuse made up by people with meaningless vocations?

Yes.

Rico was now on the precipice of realizing how he could be
above
love.

He would surely have liked to be
in love
, to solve that equation in his life, but he realized now that he could never apply himself to love if it weren't with Rachil.

If he had to follow some kind of love other than Rachil, he would (like me!) love work.

So he would follow work and let love do what it would.

He would follow his instincts and quench his physical desires free of love.

“Oooh,” the plump one said, “stupid sunshine.”

She touched her hand lightly to her sunburned chest, pulling away from Rico.

“Still hurts?” he asked.

“Mmm hmm.”

Why was she sunburned?

We can once again only surmise.

Most likely she had, three days before, drifted down a creek on an intertube with a bottle of Thunderbird and a man she had met the night before. (She looked to be a bit of a slut, so this is extremely plausible.)

She must have fallen asleep halfway through the creek ride, and somewhere along the rest of the way her “boyfriend” had docked his tube and absconded, leaving her to drift in the blazing sun.

I could see the darkish skin beginning to bubble on her neck.

More than three peeling burns in a lifetime and the chances of skin cancer rise exponentially.

My own skin sags and bulges in strange places, but I'm not concerned.

The physical life has little cause for attachment, and so I remain unattached.

For Rico, I'd imagine this unattachment was making him feel like small Mario in the original insipid game he surely loved in high school, blinking out of the visible world, soon to drop off the moving screen.

He hoped that this was in fact the true metaphor, and that this physical life was an avatar for another, further-dimensioned being who was only now connected to “him” via a controller, and once the “Rico” Rico knew flickered and faded, the other being would turn away from the screen, stretch, and go out into the wider world.

“Skin's peeling,” he said to Vita.

“So gross. I know.”

“Wanna come back to my room and I'll peel it?”

She laughed but then made the earnest fish face, eyes drinking him in.

It was a brute play, ugly, but perhaps it would serve its function and allow Rico to hear the plump one's sex squeals.

“For real,” he said and straightened up.

She giggled.

“Sure,” she said with a shrug that was anything but casual.

He didn't offer a hand, or say anything further, simply strode across the driveway toward the door.

I sighed, threw down the tap.

Would this job ever end?

It took me nearly fifteen minutes to crawl around back to the “No Trustpassing” side of the church, away from the party, to observe the goings-on in Rico's room, but I made it.

Thankless.

I saw her with a hoop earring dangling from her finger as she plopped backwards onto the thin bedspread.

Rico surely here thought of Corn.

And Rachil.

Theirs was not love but a kind of fatal boredom.

Corn trying to have what he never could when it mattered so much to him, and Rachil letting some combination of pity and lust overtake her reason.

“C'mon, babe,” Vita said in a comical sultry hush.

She had pulled her dress off over her head and now lay with her plump legs casually spread, toes wiggling off the side of the bed, bulging panties pushed up toward the ceiling.

He flipped her over.

I admit I was excited for what would happen next.

I saw her buttocks clench and release in anticipation.

Mine did the same.

But, well, I clearly did not understand these two.

Rather than ravish her from behind as any red-blooded male would have done, Rico did only what he said he would do: He straddled her barely covered rump and peeled the burnt skin from her naked back.

That's all!

And as he picked the small sheets of skin from her back, tiny ruffled reverse waves going from breaker to ocean, he told her to close her eyes.

“A tiny dinosaur is harvesting your skin with his tiny toothless beak,” he said, “flipping each piece of skin in the air before snapping it up and swallowing it down.”

She laughed, said, “Do it, dinosaur, do it!”