Emma holds up her iced tea to the plate glass and looks at the plane kaleidoscoped into the beads of condensation on its side, and catches a glimpse in one of Blaze seated next to her smiling and nodding into his phone camera and she lowers it and looks away.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Absolutely.” She’s not looking at him but she can see his waxy grin, white chicklets between his lips, hair coifed here in the airport for this last call. She told him he could wear sweatpants with the dress shirt like most people do but he wanted to wear his suit. “Sojourn,” he said. “Just a little hop across the pond.”
She shifts and takes almost a frisson of pleasure in the tug of her sweatpants. She looks at the plane again, its bulbous nose, she wishes she didn’t know exactly how it worked, how the turbines larger than she is tall sup on the air and ignite it in their bellies and compress it and spew it out into heat and force, enough to lift and launch that goliath through the sky.
She looks around and sees some of the other passengers stealing glances at her and she peers over at Blaze to see if he’s noticed; he likes when that happens. “I think what we need to keep in mind. Oh. No, go ahead.”
Most of the passengers are wearing leisure clothes. A few other suits smattered around, a Hawaiian shirt guy who looks like he would wade up to you in a communal cruise ship hot tub and offer to buy you a mojito. They read or chat or corral children. Her eyes linger on a woman about her age rocking and shushing a swaddled infant, and she’s sitting in a beam of sunlight and looks like a station of the cross or something. Emma takes a sip of her tea and looks at herself in the beads: fish-eyed, hair pulled back, eye-bagged against the brown liquid. She goes to put the tea in a cup holder, sees there isn’t one, considers putting it on the floor but decides to just stand up and walk to the window.
The planes take off and land and from here they look to be barely moving and barely angled, white paper lanterns hovering slightly up and down until they’re on the ground or out of sight. She does not look at the plane in front of her although the people in the seating area must think she is.
She walks away from the window and to the bar. There are windows all around and planes outside most of the windows and the bar is at the center of the area like the watchtower of a panopticon. She sits among the drinking people and orders a finger of rail scotch.
“Behemoth,” says someone next to her. She didn’t notice her but she smells her now, the waft of whisky. She’s older, tall, salt and pepper braid, the skin around her eyes like desert earth. She wears an uncollared white linen shirt, clean but with old stains. She wiggles something in her lap and Emma looks and there is a beat-up silver flask. The woman does not look around and raises to her lips and swigs. No one says anything or looks. Emma smiles.
“Why?”
“Cheaper.”
“How did you get it past security?”
“Jealous?” She laughs, deep like a thunder peal. She motions behind them to the plane. “Real big bastard. I saw you looking at it.”
“I wasn’t,”
“Everyone should have a drink before climbing into a dragon like that.” She laughs again, and Emma laughs too. The woman raises the flask towards her and raises an eyebrow, gestures towards it with her chin. Why not, Emma thinks, and takes it and has a sip. It’s smoother than she expected, buttery, and she holds it on her tongue for a moment before swallowing.
“Hoh. Not even a wince.”
“My dad likes whisky,” she says.
“Ha.” She takes the flask back and takes another sip and grits her teeth and exhales like she’s just stepped out of a freezer. A bartender brings Emma the scotch and she sips it and tastes it and then downs it.
“Ha.”
“What, why are you traveling, any special,”
“Oh, a bit of mischief,” she says. “Just a bit of mischief. And you?”
Emma is quiet, picturing the plane. Some figures, she guesses they would be the pilots, are moving around in the cockpit but the windows are too small and high up to make it out clearly.
“Nervous?”
“It’s a just a long time,” she says. “To be in the air.”
The woman gestures to behind them with her flask. “Don’t be afraid of old plane-kun there. Big bastard but, buoyant.”
“Plane-kun? Like the honorific?”
She laughs again. “That’s exactly right. Just a big, buddy, plane-kun. And if it turns out he isn’t your buddy, legend says, he sends you somewhere even nicer than your destination. At least in Japan.”
Emma feels goosebumps rising on her arm. “What?”
“Oh, yes. Like truck-kun, same, same idea. If plane-kun takes your life, you go somewhere good. And you can do, cool shit there, real cool shit.” She looks at her, sees her expression, laughs again. “A special privilege for the too-soon-gones. They call it,” she says, and looks at her, “isekai.” She takes another swing, overturns the flask and wiggles it. “Time for a refill,” she says and winks again. “See you there.”
“Who was that, baby?”
Arms wrap around her and she starts, turns and sees the side of Blaze’s face and the passengers rising and milling and the plane behind the glass. “Jesus,” she says.
“Someone’s jumpy,” he whispers into her ear. “Don’t worry, I don’t think this is a Boeing.”
She settles slightly into his embrace, looking at the plane. “It’s not,” she says. “It’s just plane-kun.”
“Sounds like a yoga thing. Hot.” He squeezes her ass and she starts. “Was that lady bothering you?”
“No. I think she was just a nice old weeb.”
“Boomers,” he says. “Do you mind if I take the window?”
Emma is nestled into the middle seat peering out at wall of iron clouds, trying to ignore the crawling of characters across Blaze’s powerpoint in her lower periphery, when the plane begins to bank. She can’t see the wings, just a static of gray wisps, but she feels it in her core and behind her ears.
“We’re turning,” she says. She imagines the aileron on the opposite wing tilting up imperceptibly, a degree or two. Blaze half looks up and then continues typing.
“Hmm?”
“We’re turning. Why are we turning?”
“I don’t think we are, baby.”
She looks around. Most people are staring at the seatbacks, watching content, or eating, or both. Behind her, the flight attendants are finishing their first pass, smiling, passing out meals. She realizes she’s gripping her phone, and for some reason she swipes it open and pulls up the messages app. She swallows, and looks at Blaze. He’s frowning and muttering to himself, keeps deleting and retyping a slide title. She looks down at her seatbelt, sees it’s fastened, looks at Blaze’s and sees that it isn’t. She opens her mouth and then closes it, looks back at her phone, the blinking vertical line in the messages search bar. When did she press that?
A glimmer catches her eye and she looks at the ring. She’s still not used to it.
A thud sounds behind her, and she whips around and one of the flight attendants is apologizing to someone, and Emma turns back and all she can think is to clutch her phone to her chest with both hands.
“Baby, it’s normal to turn. There are these things, checkpoints, that they use.” He’s still typing.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” she says.
“Baby,”
“Just fucking buckle it.”
He pauses his typing, looks at her, furrows his brow. “Ok,” he says. He buckles it, and she thinks she wants to say that she’s sorry, but she doesn’t. Her heart feels on fire, she can almost see it, white flames the color of glass licking up with each beat and searing her from the inside, until she’s reduced to something essential. “Ok, but really,”
He’s interrupted by another thud, and then another. People’s lunches and drinks have started sliding off their trays.
“Hmm,” he says, and she can feel it, top of the roller coaster, she can see in her head the flow of vapor over the wing to their right shift as it ceases generating lift and the whole vessel becomes just a tube in the sky and with a lurch and a jolt to her thighs like someone hit them with a bokken they plunge.
She has never seen or even conceived of a three-dimensional space so violently filled. Meals slam and spatter into the bulkhead, devices soar upwards as if slapped by giants and shatter into shards, the contents of bags empty, pens and pencils and papers and tampons and wallets and cords, people suddenly tumble upwards, like bad special effects in an old kung fu movie. Somewhere, the beverage cart crashes and cans are pierced and undercut the screams and moaning of the engine with hissing and spraying liquid. The lights flicker off, and then on, freezing everything and unfreezing it, her legs feel broken where the seatbelt sinks into them, sinking deeper somehow, Blaze is screaming something and clutching for her, but she rattles out a breath and grips her phone until the edges slice into her fingers and peels her hands away from her chest in the waxing and waning light and the flurry of particles and second by second, it is the only thing that has ever mattered, types a name, and types “I love you” and hits send, and she sees the gray text, delivered and thanks god silently and lets it go, and there is a bass laughter beneath it all, and she lets everything go, and her eyes and her heart are burning in the glassy tongues and burn until nothing is left.
It starts as a tinny rattle, coins in a can scraping against her ears. Then it sort of congeals into segments, plosive puffs and rasps in the blackness, pie, pile, pilot, the severity of the t, like saying tulip.
“Autopilot,” says the plane. “Autopilot.”
“Emma, baby? Emma?”
Blaze is looking at her. Her head hurts, her legs. Light slams across the seatback and there is a splotch of blood on it. The woman next to her is sleeping, head lolled to the side.
“Emma, look at me,”
She looks and he is hazy. He holds up some fingers, says something, she laughs, doesn’t know why.
“Autopilot problem.” Someone cackles like a teapot breaking. Blaze is looking up at the bulkhead, at the broken-jawed baggage compartments and some wires hanging. Moaning, crying, laughing.
“Blaze,”
“Hey, hey, are you ok?”
“Where’s, where are we?”
“Where?”
He looks around, kind of gestures at the cabin. It looks like the aftermath of a bombed box store. Suddenly he wretches, tears up, clutches at her again.
“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much.”
“You,” she says, “you.” Her tongue is molten. She feels like she’s falling but realizes they’re moving forward still, she sees the wing, a stripe of silver on a coruscating swathe, the ocean. It looks like a knife on a blue tablecloth.
“Safe,” the plane says. “Diverting.”
“Another world,” someone says.
She falls asleep or slips into a smelted place. The plane liquifies and flattens and the speed, she condenses, she is an orb and she is pulled into a line, she is the curved edge of an accretion disc, and she is still alive but it is, she is, the world is refracting with no angles, round, there’s Blaze and his hair is ruffled or distorted and she wants to tell him she likes it, the woman lolling beside her and groaning, the plane apologizing to her, thick and all the passengers spattered across a window like bugs, the wing, the flaps licking outwards from them, the thunk of the landing gear, and thunk of the landing, her legs hurt.
Shuffling, strips of beady lights rushing towards her, a hairy hand offers her a cracked phone and she snatches it, “is the ring ok?”, the ring glinting and a staircase beyond onto pavement blotched with firefighters.
It’s that mosaic that wakes her up. A dry tarmac and palm trees in the distance, lush and ludicrous, and firefighters sort of loitering around, a hose dripping foam from its tip, looks disappointed she thinks.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she says.
“Baby?” Blaze, behind her. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she says, and then vomits onto the stairs. It’s like she’s just unfrozen time, people in uniforms are soaring up towards her like Valkyries, with concerned expressions, she almost flinches. “I’d like a drink.”
The hotel or the airline is covering their expenses so she orders two fingers of Macallan 18. The bar is practically a VJ Day celebration, people in floral shirts with the tags still on, no sign of their luggage yet, bandages over various extremities. Some eyes are newly bright, some watery. Couples kiss or don’t. Everyone is drinking.
“Amazing no one died,” someone says.
“Or we all did.” Laughter. “4, 8, 15, 16, someone write this down, the smoke’s coming,”
Blaze’s hand rests over hers on the bar top and he squeezes it lightly every thirty seconds or so; she’s been counting.
“Are you sure you’re ok?” he says. She looks at him and smiles and takes a drink. Treacle and brimstone, her throat in the sun.
“Are you?”
He runs his other hand through his hair and sighs, sips his gin and tonic.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“You knew what was happening, and I acted like you were crazy. Just, the odds. I mean, what the fuck, right?”
“How do you feel?”
He takes another sip, says, fuck it, and tells the bartender, what she’s having. He squeezes her hand, looks at the ring, moves it around with his thumb and index finger so that it sparkles. “That moment when we dropped, I guess, I’d been so buried in that fucking deck. And then my computer was just gone. Smashed. Felt like the universe was trying to tell me something. And I thought, ‘thank God we’re together.’”
She reaches out to stroke his cheek, run her hand along his jaw. She feels flushed, swept up in him, has the urge suddenly to actually bathe in him, to genuflect before the vessel of him and pour him over herself in an act of ablution.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she shudders, tosses the rest of the whisky back and puts her hand on top of his and guides it down to her leg, and up her thigh, shrinks at the moment of pain. “I need you,” she says.
In the room, he says, “I should shower,” but she puts a finger over his lip and her lips over her finger and says, “I don’t want to take my eyes off of you for a second.” With her other hand she works her sweatpants around her hips, conscious of the weight in her pocket, wanting not to feel it. “Get these off,” she says, and he does and she unzips his pants and slides her hand into his boxers, feels him, ready, strokes him and he moans. She steps out of her pants and kicks them away, sighs, relief, looks at him while she moves his hand between her legs.
On the bed she climbs on top of him and arches upwards and peels off her shirt, he exhales at the sight of her breasts dropping out of it, moves his hands to caress them but she pins his arms down, stares at him, doesn’t dare look away, doesn’t want to think about anything else but him, and starts moving her hips, teasing him, leans over him until she’s grazing his chest, kisses his cheek and his lips and moves to kiss his neck but stops, she needs to see his face, is scared not to.
Her hands are still over his and she works him inside her with her hips, rocking, a little more each time, and he closes his eyes and grunts and she wants to close her eyes but she can’t. She looks at him, moves up and down, slowly then quickly because she can’t close her eyes and it feels just like,
“I love you,” he says.
Her eyes feel hot. “I love you,” she says, almost sputters it.
When he’s about to finish, the thought of it, the sudden flush of warmth inside her, finally makes her close her eyes in shock, and she gasps and opens them and slides off of him and works her lips over him, looks at his face writhing.
“Oh my god,” he says.
“Hold me,” she says, and crawls up next to him and puts her face next to his and looks at his chest heaving up and down.
“I wish we didn’t have to sleep,” she says.
“Oh, me too,” he says, and laughs, and wraps his arms around her.
“Don’t sleep,” she says.
“Ok,” he says. “We should almost die more often.”
He falls asleep and she looks at him sleeping and hears his voice. He says, I love you and I will die for you and burn away my waking hours for your sake and our sake and for theirs when they come.
When she looks away, to the black in the window, she hears another voice, and it says your eyes are the primordial untouched ice within the southern floes and their striations the map of the ferrous fields of the earth and your body the perfected will of beings beyond the earth and your mind the sum of all stars and I would that I could dance among them crazed like a bloodthirsty man of war before battle without end or that you were a book or painting I could devour but you are not and you cannot be bound and you scare me.
She rises and observes her rising in the mirror, pale and sinuous and shadowed, and moves to the bathroom and dons a robe and slippers and puts her hand on the doorhandle and looks back at her pants crumpled on the floor and outline of the rectangle contoured within them. She releases the handle and approaches the pile as she might a snake, not now looking at him but anywhere else. She slips her hand into the pocket and slides the phone out and into her robe and leaves the room.
On the beach among the improbable palm trees she sinks her toes into the sand and the seasounds cradle and rock her like an infant as she weeps. She levels the phone and the stars thick as canopied leaves pepper the spaces between the cracks.
On the beach between the glistening sand and the lapping sea serving the stars as if on a plate she feels that she is walking on a narrow bridge out and up from the earth and is between two places. She looks up at the stars and tries to recognize them but she does not. She does not see order where it should be and her body tightens for a moment and then releases. She sits in the sand and opens her phone.
In the morning she orders room service, steak and eggs and avocado and yogurts and coffee and champagne, and the trundling of the cart as she pulls it into the room stirs him.
“Breakfast in bed?” His voice is muffled under the blanket. A hand emerges and paws the table until it finds his vape, pulls it back underneath, she hears the steam hiss of the small engine. He emerges in a haze, flush and lean and blinking in the light. “Woah,” he says.
“Let’s get drunk,” she says, lifts the champagne bottle out of the ice and raises it above her chest until the condensation drops into her cleavage. She looks at him sideways and smiles and he laughs.
“As tempting as this, is,” he says. He leaves the words suspended.
“Come on,” she says. “YODO.”
He looks at her and then looks out the window and takes another hit of his vape. “They said they fixed the plane, or there’s another one or whatever.”
She’s been working the cork of the bottle and it pops and they both flinch and she laughs and a little after he laughs.
“I don’t think I’m ready,” she says, “to get back on that plane.”
He looks at her, smiling, takes another hit, looks out the window again.
“What?” she says. She’s pouring two glasses. She overpours one and it fizzes over and clarifies and runs down the stem and pools around the base, twinkles.
“You seem happy,” he says. “It’s nice.”
“Have a drink, it will perk you up,” she says. She hands him a glass and tinks her own against it. “Kanpai.”
They drink the glasses and then two more and soon he is pink-cheeked and laughing as she dances in the room, and sings, and beckons him to dance with her, and she throws open the doors to the balcony and delivers a monologue to the trees. He wraps his arms around her from behind like he did at the airport and she starts and then settles into them as she did then. The palms blow in the breeze and the sky is a cross-section of aquamarine and the beach a white belt girdling the sea.
“Who are you,” he chuckles into her ear, “and what did you do with my fiancée?”
“I’m right here.” They are still for a time but each lap of the sea seems to recharge her and she breaks from his embrace and twirls on the balcony until her robe comes open and she strikes a pose for him.
“Emma,” he says. She forms her lips into a mock O and recovers herself.
“You’d like if they saw and you know it,” she says. “Let’s get another bottle.”
“What,” he says. She is already walking inside but turns and he closes his mouth.
“We almost fucking died,” she says. She walks back up to him and puts her arms around his neck. “Just let me have this,” she says. “Just let me have one day. Just have fun with me for one day. Ok?”
He is quiet for a moment and then laughter bursts from him like a mine going off. “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck. You’re right.” He points to the phone and says, “another bottle for the madame at once.”
They order another bottle and drink it and she feels like sunlight itself, warm and bright and not knowing where it came from, not knowing anything at all, not caring, just warming and brightening and exciting the air.
On the way to the beach they pass through the bar to a chorus of applause and cheers. About half of the passengers are there, drinking, and a few have stood up and are beaming at them and clapping.
“Oh,” Blaze says.
“Congratulations,” says the man in the Hawaiian shirt, the man rattling off the numbers last night. He is sunburnt, somehow, and smells like a split coconut as he walks over and holds his hand out to be shaken. “You did good, kid.”
Emma smiles and says, thank you everyone.
“Hey,” the man shouts. Everyone in the bar looks up. “They just got engaged!”
The reaction is mostly volcanic, an explosion of heys, woahs, wows, beautifuls, ohs, oh mys, praise Gods, all racing towards him and he thinks maybe about to sear off his eyebrows.
“Oh,” he says. “Thank you so much.”
The sand is white and hot and its heat radiates upwards and the faux leather of the lounge chairs has absorbed it and they have to get into the water and get wet before they can lie down. She orders a piña colada and so he does too. The glasses are round and glisten in the heat and the liquid is too thick for the straws so they sip it right from the rim.
“How did they know?” He says.
She raises her hand and wiggles her fingers and with her other hand takes a sip of the drink. He looks at her thighs, at the purple welts spilling across them.
“I mean how did they know it just happened?”
“I must’ve mentioned it last night.”
“When I was in the bathroom?”
She sips. “Probably after you went to sleep.”
“You went back downstairs?”
“I asked you not to go to sleep,” she says. “Am I not allowed to go get a drink?”
“I’m just surprised you didn’t mention it.” He takes two sips, and then a third. He is squinting in the light and his brows feel like they are collapsing into his eyes. “What’s going on?”
“We’re drinking piña coladas on a beautiful beach.”
“You haven’t looked at me all day.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You didn’t even look at me just now,”
“You have no idea. I’m wearing sunglasses.”
“Emma,” he says. She sips. “What is this?”
“Jesus Christ. Not everything needs a fucking case study.”
“Why are you acting like this?”
She is quiet for awhile. He settles back into his lounge. He finishes his drink and orders another.
“Two,” she says. The server nods and goes away.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You already explained. I keep, not forgetting. It doesn’t feel real. It feels like TV or something.”
“I did,” she says. “I sure did.”
“What?”
“I explained. I asked very nicely. I ordered you breakfast. I’ve been perfectly delightful. I asked for one day.”
“But you haven’t looked at me.”
“One day, Blaze.”
“Why aren’t you looking at me?”
“Jesus,” she says. “I’m looking at the ocean. At the sky. Look where we are. It’s, I mean just look around.”
The server returns with the drinks and takes their empty glasses and puts the new ones down on the table between them. Blaze says, thank you so much. This one isn’t as thick so he sips out of the straw, keeps the straw in his mouth and takes in a slow constant trickle as he looks around. The colors of the trees and the sand and the sea are too much of themselves, too much, like the telescope pictures, the light pillars, too much, too many colors.
“Something isn’t right,” he says. “I think maybe I hit my head after all.”
“One day,” she says. She laughs at a church decibel. “Just one.”
In the morning they bring back their bags and tell them there’s another flight they can get on. They shower and change and then repack the bags and roll them down to the lobby to catch the shuttle to the airport. At the sliding doors of the main entrance Blaze realizes Emma is not beside him. He turns around and sees her stopped by the bar, in front of a woman.
“I didn’t know you were here,” Emma says.
The woman is watching something sharply animated on her phone. A young boy is crossing a street at night holding a grocery bag. The woman looks up and takes a sip from a double glass of brown liquor.
Emma looks at her for a moment and then laughs, long and deep, great vesicles of noise rising out of her chest and erupting from her. The woman looks at her and then turns back to her drink.
“Shot of rail whisky,” Emma says to the bartender.
“Emma,” Blaze says from the door. She doesn’t react, watches as the man pours the drink. She rifles in her bag for a bill and puts it on the bar and the man says thank you and slides the glass over.
“To the new world,” Emma says, and downs the shot. It is rough as meteor skin and she smiles and wipes her mouth with the side of her hand and makes for the door.
Lemons
3/8 of a lemon
“They sent it back.”
It’s dim in the living room because the window looks out on a porch with a cantilevered roof and the meager yard has a tree that eats the light. Mutta is turning my business card, which is made of thin black metal, over in his hand. Today, canonically, Mutta is a he.
“What?”
“You know,” he forms a horizontal L with his other hand, points it into his mouth.
“Oh,” He’s staring at the wall but waiting for me to say something else, “Jesus.”
“Yep.”
“What, just, like in a box? Sent it?”
“In a bag.”
My brain spits out an image of oily red pool on a light brown carpet. “A,?”
“Clear, like, police bag with some labels on it. Case codes, his case codes.”
“Did they clean it?”
“Nope.”
I laugh. He looks at me, sees it’s out of shock, shakes his head. I look at the carpet. This one is shag and multi-colored.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” he says.
“I can’t believe they didn’t,”
“It’s fucked,”
“So there’s still, I mean I’m trying to remember from the pictures,”
“Yes.”
I am an iron buddha on the couch. Images flick into my head like cards from an auto shuffler, the gun, holding the gun and shooting it at a target, the sand and sun of the range, the gloves, his face, sending the texts that day, his dead face, a pool of blood on a light brown carpet, but my face and body are rigid and I am conquering them all.
“Will you look at it?”
I look at her. Him.
“I’m sorry to ask that, bud. I just, can’t, be the only one to have, I, do you understand?”
“Yes. Yeah. Of course. I will.”
“And then we can decide. What to do with it. Melt it down maybe,”
“Yes, we’ll figure it out. We’ll, there’s something that will feel right, I know what you mean, like, selling it, no, we’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah. Thank you.”
He smiles. Quiet. I spew air out of my mouth. He does another line. I do one and a half lines.
1 lemon
The townhouses in my neighborhood are a binary sequence of shitholes and rejuvenated starter homes for upper young professionals. Some are qubits, a little bit of both, new paint and sans serif address plate but the gardens enervated, husks of plants and hunks of concrete, what you’d imagine the blast zone of a thermonuclear explosion to look like a few years on.
Across the street a man and a woman pushing a stroller from the opposite direction look at us and smile. I think of a video I saw once of a man killing himself. He jumps off of a ten-story building and lands, somehow, directly on a stroller.
“Nice day,” Mutta says to them from our side of the street.
“Happy to be out with my family,” the man says.
At the grocery store Mutta tells me to get snacks for the pregame while he gets the booze so I use one of the wipes near the entrance to scrub my hands and then walk towards the carbohydrate area. Bright in here and lots of people shuffling around with produce. The flower section is nearly depleted, modern times I guess, it looks like a twister hit it. I fix a rictus as I close in on the snack aisle.
Cereal comes first and there’s a little boy arguing with his mother.
“It has the same calories,” he says. He’s emphasizing his point by thrusting a bright box of cereal towards her. She is holding a less bright box. The snack section is behind them.
“It’s not all about calories, bud.”
“She’s right,” says dad, who I didn’t notice because he was standing exactly behind mom. “Not today.”
I inhale through my nose, atom-by-atom, but my heart has just started beating like a church bell. I force myself a few steps down the aisle but the closer I get to them the harder it is to walk. I stop and pretend to browse the cereal boxes. One of the boxes has a vampire in a dark cloak. I see a paper-winged angel, salad, a bouquet of pink roses browning at the edges. I put the empty basket down and walk out of the grocery store.
I’m shimmering again a few minutes after wading into the dim of the living room and polishing off the whisky I left on the table. A jet engine in slow motion, the turbines inhaling the air and compressing it chamber by chamber until it’s clean and hot then exhaling it in a neat plume.
The screen door clacks open and he walks in and looks at me, holding a case of beer and a bag with a few bottles of wine and another bag full of lemons.
“You ok?” He says.
“Sorry,” I put my face in my hands and rub my cheeks, “I said it was early. I don’t know how you do that. I don’t like,” I clench and unclench my hands,
“Hey, hey, everything is good bud,” he says, and puts the bags down.
Gnashing my jaws. “I’ll pay for that stuff.”
“Don’t be manipulative.” He walks over and sits on the couch. Atom-by-atom.
“Will you please stop? I just got a little wigged out, ok?”
He laughs. “You seemed fine enough on the way over. Staring at all the women.”
One atom, two atoms, three atoms. “I’m sorry.”
“Come here,” he says.
Four atoms, five atoms. He spreads his arms and I hug him. A few seconds pass and then I get up and go sit on the recliner across the room.
“Can I do another one?” I say.
“You tell me.”
I force a chuckle. “Yes. All good.”
He looks at me. A wolf, right up against the glass wall of the enclosure. I look back.
“Ok,” he says.
0.25 lemons
I am an appliance that was just plugged in for the first time. A happy spark crackles in my sinuses and channels over the next minute through my olfactory system, uses it like a circuit board. It splits off into each of my eye sockets, and the motes concentrate there for another minute and then each goes critical. Another minute and they’re contracted, post-nova dwarves in my irises, hot and sharp, and now I can cut into whatever I look at, peel it apart and know it and loom over it. My body is wrapped in a clean heat, like the shimmer behind a fighter jet.
Mutta slices and dices, all he needs is an egg and an onion volcano, raising and razing hillocks of powder, parting the piles like Moses. Five new lines on the table. He does one, I do one. He tells me he’s just bought a laser hat that prevents follicular deterioration. I can’t tell if I’m nodding too fast or too slow, doesn’t bother me that I can’t tell.
I open my phone to scroll for a moment and there is an ad in the feed encouraging me to make it a special day. People can’t even fucking write, I say, marketers, they’re all, it’s such bullshit.
Two lines later I’ve achieved samadhi. Seems like he has too. His eyes are broken glass, kind of tearing space wherever he looks. He settles back into the couch. Shit. Ready to really talk. I lean forward and hunch on my knees and cut up the room with my god vision, I think not for the first time that it’s the rinnegan. It boils down everything I look at in a crucible and leaves me with an essential image, like learning a demon’s true name. The rug: a bacchanal, people dancing, disco lights. My laptop charging in the corner: the Gmail inbox, wearing a suit on a cool night, taking $300 out of an ATM.
Mutta: playing with a miniature red backhoe on an azure day in a sandbox and lots of grass around, powder on a mirror in a big bathroom, a wolf in the zoo.
0.5 lemons
“I’m going to have some more whisky if you’d like anything,” I say. I get up and walk back to the kitchen.
“Just tequila and water. Can I have one of those lemon slices?”
“Yeah.” I want to smile very broadly with my numb teeth and shake someone’s hand and ask how their family is doing.
I take the whisky out of the cabinet and pour my drink and take a small swig from the bottle. I take the tequila and start pouring his drink. He starts laughing.
“I don’t need the lemon slice if it’s going to be a big thing.”
“Why would it be a big thing? That’s why we have lemons.”
“Do you want me to slice the lemon?”
“Jesus Christ, are you worried I’m going to cut myself?”
I take another swig from the bottle and take a new lemon from the bowl, even though we’ve only used half of the old one. I realize the bottom is moldy so I take a different one and start slicing it. The knife is dull so I have to kind of mush the lemon down in order to pierce the skin. My eye sparks suddenly surge, reject this infringement on seamlessness, and I fight the urge to throw the knife at the wall.
An angel with paper wings calmly peeling an orange. I put the knife down.
“We ‘re going dancing tonight, want to come?” I say.
“Who is ‘we’?”
I squeeze my eyes shut and clench my jaw. I open my eyes and look at my work. The lemon slice is bedraggled and juice glistens in the eyots of the plastic cutting board, little tepid streams. No. No.
I take another knife from the drawer and cut a better slice, like a capsized canoe.
“You should come,” I say, “it’ll be fun, it’ll be a good, uh, good time. The usual suspects. The gang. Girl I’m seeing.”
“I don’t want to,”
“My friends love you. Plus, you know. It’s today.”
I almost plop the lemon slice into the tequila but stop myself and make a small cross-wise slice in the flesh and then rub it along the rim and stick it on the side and arrange it. I open a drawer and dig around until I find a few drink umbrellas left over from a party. I pop one open and place it in the glass and pick it up and walk to the living room.
I make a big thing of presenting the drink, walking out like a gameshow girl and displaying it from different angles. He laughs.
“Have a drink and then decide,” I say.
After two drinks he suggests we go to the grocery store to get beer and wine for the pregame. I look at the window. The bamboo blinds are falling apart. A string of paper cranes is caught in them like in a web. Outside it is searing bright beyond the porch and tree. A glass of curdling milk.
“Yeah. Ok. It’s still kind of early.”
“I thought people were coming over early.”
I look down at the rug. “Yeah. Ok. Let’s go.”
11 lemons
My dealer bursts into the postgame swaying to sporadic shouts of recognition and fist bumps and hellos. A pyroclastic flow devouring flora from a distance. Bass is slapping me, a piano sample, a man raps in staccato.
“How was the rocky?” He says as he swaggers into the kitchen and with impossible celerity produces a baggie and dumps it onto the island, dumps it from high enough it makes a sort of impact zone.
While the saints prepare to march upon the new white hill I grab Mutta’s arm and say “can we talk?” and he looks at me and says “what?”
I drag him outside.
“What the fuck,” I say.
“What,”
“Did you think I didn’t see that in the club?”
“Are you kidding,”
“That was really fucking inappropriate.”
“How dare you,” he says. “Your dealer just, your drug dealer just, and you’re going to fucking, lecture me on, on appropriate? How dare you.” He makes to go back inside but I block him with my arm and he, she, fuck this, she half shoves me and slams the screen door open and says, “my son wants me to leave.”
I should follow her but I sit on one of the chairs outside on the patio. They are velvet lounge chairs that are not meant to be outside but the canopy shields from the elements. A sewer, climbing into a sewer to pluck the baby birds out. She knocked them out of the nest in the first place, so was it really all that noble? The pop of a champagne bottle inside. Saints, true saints.
They come to check on me and I say “please make her leave.”
“Happy Father’s Day,” someone says inside. “So cute, I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding.”
I walk to the car and wait and she does not come out. The time she crashed the car, the jolt, shattered brake light on the asphalt.
I try to open the car door with the idea to gesture for her to get in when she appears but it’s locked so I pull on the handle until something cracks and then start to walk away, from the car and the house and down the street.
“Fuck, fuck,” I say. There are no streetlights and the lights in the houses like mine are very dim and far away and the lights in the other houses are bright but the houses are higher and I can’t see into them. I trip over some piece of furniture on the curb and I kick it three times until it is in the street, kick it between cars, she can wreck the guts of her car on it, but I think then she won’t leave and I pick it up and carry it back to the curb and drop it and then scream at it and grind my jaw and will it to rise into the sky and pull all the houses up with and to it and become a second moon. It sheens and is still.
“Happy Father’s Day,” I say. “To all three of you.”
I sink to the balls of my feet and tense my entire body, intending to vibrate apart.
0 lemons
I haven’t made any plans for today but I know what I’d like to do. Sure enough, after a few minutes of chatting Mutta produces a baggie and upends it onto my coffee table. I am a sage.
He looks like an emaciated snow owl, hunting. He surveys the table, then the room. His eyes linger on the recliner in the corner, musty, looks forgotten there, a shibboleth, like a phone book. He starts rifling through his bag.
I pull out my wallet and hand him one of my business cards.
“I’m proud of you for trying, bud. Really,” he raises the card, “and at least you got something useful out of it.”
Inside my boots I curl and uncurl my toes. “Well, thanks,”
“It wasn’t easy, that time,”
“Thank you Mutta.”
He lowers the card to just above the pile and then stops and pulls it back to his lap and continues flipping it over. Jesus Christ.
“You, I had clients. I had, quite a few. The timing,”
“Bud,” he raises a papal hand, greeting a congregation, “not your fault. I’m saying I’m proud of you.”
“Yeah, thank you,”
“You ok? You seem flat.” No fucking wonder, when you’re diddling the implement around like a demented circus ape instead using it for its intended. For the purpose for which I just kindly slid it out of wallet and handed it to you.
“Yeah,”
“You sure you want to,”
“Yeah, yes,” my mouth hangs open, warm spit is pooling under my tongue.
He looks down at the card, frowns. Uh oh. “He calls this stuff raki, I guess. Is he Turkish? Doesn’t look Turkish, but,”
“Oh, I think it’s rocky. Like, chunky, crystal-, having.” He laughs, I laugh. Good.
He lowers the card to the table again and starts a hibachi routine, isolates a small pile and cuts and coaxes it into four lines, like vapor trails on the gray wood. The walls sort of lean in to admire his work.
He scans the room again and then starts, reaches into his pocket and extracts a dollar-width strip of printer paper rolled into a proboscis and secured with scotch tape. He pauses there, about to descend, and looks at me looking at him.
“What,” he says, fingering the tube. I’m smiling.
“It’s nothing.” I look at the lines and the area behind my eyes starts to itch.
“Making fun of my, tube?”
“I would never,” I say, and laugh, and that makes him smile for a moment. I pull out one of the coffee table drawers and find a Benjamin and start working it between my fingers like a cigarette wrapper.
“Don’t use that,” he says, “seriously bud? You know that’s how people, you know you could catch something?”
I regard the bill. Benjamin is grinning softly at me and the scent of gasoline is making my brain salivate. “You’re really going to talk to me about healthy choices?”
“Fuck yourself, bud. Seriously? Want me to scoop it up and leave? Just take it.” He offers his tube, almost fresh, probably wrought this morning. I look at the tip, glistening a bit from his nostril. I look at him. His eyes are sharp and I feel like I’m looking at some old majestic animal in the zoo, a wolf or something.
“I’ll make my own tube.”
7 lemons
In the dark of the club a perfect cylinder of bleaching light forms as if it is solid and has always been there, and in it I see Mutta kissing one of my friends. It evaporates.
I wince into the lights until they are vague halations and sip my drink and reach for my girlfriend’s hand and squeeze it.
“Can we,” I say, “let’s, can we leave.”
“Postgame?” she says.
1.5 lemons
The light has leaked out of the day and my friends trickle in and they are a line of saints or wisemen beneath the stars and I am smiling and laughing drinking and the milieu of my house now elicits truer images when I behold it, the rug is alive with dance steps and the flashing lights of a Hue system, the recliner is a phonebook opened to the page of a storied liquor store where the proprietor knows my name and sets aside bottles of Old Rip Van Winkle for me even when he knows I can’t afford them anymore, even at wholesale.
There is a gravity of comfort here among my people and it beckons me to ease into water and frolic. My skull is a cauldron of lava. I put lemon slices and umbrellas in everyone’s drink. Mutta and me take turns sneaking up to my room to recharge.
This is my kingdom. I can create moons and raise the dead.
“Yes, well he’s had three, counting me,” Mutta says behind me. “He’s a good boy.”
Even when I am facing away, my eyes pierce through the wall and the city and the horizon all the way around the earth to the other side of the house and back through the opposite wall until I see him behind me, a little aloof, a little bashful.
“Yes, well you know he’s never met his real, you know,” my girlfreind laughs, “and then it was just us two, we had such a good time, he was so cute, he’d get me tools and things for Father’s Day, and then I had a husband, you know, about that I imagine,” I walk across the room and start making another drink.
One of my friends comes over and places my business card on the counter. I realize I left it on the coffee table.
“So sick,” he says. “How’s it going, still crushing it?”
“You know it,” I say. “Fuckin’ A.”
My girlfriend finds me a few minutes later and comes up behind me. I can feel her hair and the prick of a little crane earring on my neck. I lean back into her, wish I could slip into her decolletage and sit there for the rest of the night watching the world from her.
“You’re so sweet,” she says, “including her like this. You’re a good son.”
“You don’t think it’s weird?”
“Why would it be weird,” she says.
“Even, I mean you know she also,”
“Everyone does.”
“Sometimes I, think it’s weird, like, this isn’t,”
“Shh,” she takes my shoulders and turns me around and touches my nose. “Who cares?”
The kitchen lights are goldening her hair.”
“Paper-wing angel,” I say.
“That’s me,” she says.
13 lemons
It is wrong and quiet when I return to the house and I hear cautious calling from upstairs, my girlfriend’s voice calling. My saints are somber. My dealer is catatonic on the couch.
“It’s fine,”
“You should probably,”
I walk into the kitchen and angle myself so that nobody can see and turn the faucet on and then take a pull from a bottle of something. I turn off the faucet and walk upstairs.
At the top of the stairs I can see into my room, and see my desk with the lines and also now a bag and a black object inside.
“Are you fucking,”
My girlfriend is genuflected by the bathroom door as if in a final adoration and she looks at me frightened and I hold out my hands and will them to be paper so that she can shoulder them and fly away. They just shake.
“She, she just took it out, to show, and started, she was really freaked out, I didn’t even,”
I take her in my arms and say it’s ok, I love you, where is she now, she nods to the door,
“There was, I think she broke the mirror.”
I kiss her forehead and say, please wait downstairs, and she squeezes me and goes down and the saints whisper. White smoke.
Shinra tensei. My shoulder is in the door and it is splintering around me and the sparks are hot and the mirror is shattered and she is supine on the floor bleeding from three gashes on her wrist.
“Oh,” I say, “oh, what, it wasn’t, loaded? Harder than it looks on tv?”
She moves weakly, eyeshadow and mascara have burned her face, I’m sorry, she says,
“You are not a fucking child,” I say. “You are not my fucking, peer. You are not my father. None of you were. None, none, I have none, just this fucking, mess on my bathroom floor. Fucking mess.”
They have come gently up the stairs but I have been careful to whisper and I take a towel from the rack and wrap it around her arm and when the heads appear around the frame I am weeping and I say she’ll be fine but please I can’t
I am sucked out of the bathroom and they rush in in my wake and my girlfriend hugs me.
“I need a little air, can you put that, away,” I gesture to the room and she nods and goes there.
I walk down the stairs and past the mirror in the hall and my eyes are flat and dilated and I pick up a bottle of something and splash it onto my dealer and he stirs and stills again.
I walk outside.
I walk away from mother and father and my house and the mercy of the saints and the angel anonymous into the dimness, in the dimness I can shimmer.