The college girl in the leg cast was
telling me how, when she was a little kid, she had a puppy that
strangled itself to death on its own leash. Her dad had to tie the
puppy up to a kitchen chair at night or else it would roam the house
chewing up everything, all their shoes, everything. Her leg cast was
resting on my lap. I was almost old enough to drive. My parents were
gone and this was my sister’s party. Things had changed, you could
tell, and so I was going to, too. And this girl was my first step.
“Where was I?” Rachel said, staring into her phone.
“Your puppy strangling itself?”
“Yeah okay so the little bastard
pulled the chair across the kitchen before he actually died. I swear
that night I heard the chair dragging across the floor. Thought it
was just a ghost. You know how dogs smile when they pant? They look,
like, happy? I still remember that smile. So don’t get a puppy.
They’re cute, but cute things are more disturbing dead.” We’d
broached the subject of strangled puppies when Rachel said I reminded
her of a puppy, particularly of her choked puppy, with its eyes
bulged out of its sockets, with its nose dry as an eraser, with a
strained Alligator smile on its face. Of that puppy, I reminded her.
My hand was resting consciously,
bravely, on her cast. Her cast was hard and so was I. She blew a
cloud of smoke at me, over me, thinking she looked cooler than she
did. I had that effect on people: my inoffensiveness making them
brazen, indulging inner illusions of movie stars playing street
punks. “Amanda’s brother,” she said, looking me over. She’d
said that a few times, considering the novelty of it. Me—Amanda’s
brother. I didn’t know this girl Rachel well, but I knew she
belonged to that group of my sister’s friends that The Parents
weren’t allowed to meet. I knew one thing about her, actually: she
was sitting alone on the couch, looking like she was waiting for
someone; I thought he was me.
I watched smoke seep into our house:
the furniture, the carpet, the walls, the cross, our family pictures,
and the family emergency plan I had hung up years ago. A kid was just
rolling joints at the table where we never ate. He’d been there all
night meticulously rolling joints with single-purpose tranquility,
passing them out to the crowd of beggars, like my dad manning the
grill on the Fourth of July, handing out hot dogs to all the cousins.
Only smoke in the backyard, remember guys? After midnight, the rules
went out the window. It was bugging me. But I was trying to chill.
Last time I’d seen Amanda, I asked her if she had any idea how she
was going to get the smell of weed out of the house before The
Parents came home. She ruffled my hair, pretty drunk, and told me not
to worry about it, and to get away from her.
At least I had an alibi: I was at my
friend’s. My sister didn’t, and there would be no saving her. I
hoped she enjoyed her last night on this earth. I hoped this was
worth it.
“I won’t get in trouble if they’re
not coming back,” Amanda had reasoned. Even though I was too old to
believe that, I went cold at the thought that my parents might have
abandoned me—like an unwanted puppy in a box on the street.
Amanda was betting that it wouldn’t matter, because nothing did
anymore. They would be too preoccupied with divorce to reprimand her
for throwing a little party. “Little” ha ha ha. Because
they weren’t coming back together, Amanda said. Something vital
broke, and things were different now, haven’t I felt it? Or are you
that thick Nick, really?
Mom hadn’t come home from work on
Thursday. She was staying with grandma. She needed some time. Dad,
after a few long hours of staring at himself in a blank TV screen,
was called away on an “emergency business trip.” He told us he
had to go and left us some money and the door slammed shut.
“What’re we going to do?” I
asked helplessly.
Amanda shrugged. But I saw: gears
turning mischievously. Here we stood in an abandoned house. “What
are we going to do,” she repeated. “Good question, buddy.”
The Parents surrendered the house; now
it belonged to us. “Don’t you see? The whole thing’s in pieces.
This is like East Berlin. The rules are kaput. And we need to take
advantage of it. We deserve to, all the shit we’ve been putting up
with,” Amanda said.
Well, Amanda deserved to. She invited
me to get out of dodge, go to my friend’s house. I got angry, and
told her I was staying. She reminded me how I got when I was stoned,
i.e. nervous and depressed. Amanda got me high once, in the bathroom
we shared. “This is a really irresponsible and terrible thing to be
doing to you,” she said as she handed me her pipe. “I’m ruining
you!” as she lit the bowl. “Why am I doing this?” she asked. I
thought it was going to be fun but it wasn’t. I became anxious,
really started hating myself, and thought everyone must know we were
high, even the neighbors, whom I thought I heard talking about it,
the smell, and the cops were coming, and my feet were cold. All my
socks felt wet. I took off one pair and put on new ones and those
were wet too.
Now I was a little stoned and felt
okay. Acceptance: the levees were broken and the city abandoned, so
what? I felt mellow and hollow. I was going to hook up with this
college girl. I would tell everyone, all my nerdy friends, in places
where girls my own age whom I actually liked would overhear.
And I swear I was about to lean in and
plant one on her when he showed up. A lanky kid wearing a Flaming
Lips t-shirt. Red eyes under his glasses darted from me to her, and
the casted foot resting on my crotch. “Cheddar!” Rachel said. If
Cheddar wasn’t his birth name, he might have got the nickname
because of his hair. Shoulder-length greasy blonde hair that looked
stiff as a mop. Go away, I thought. You cockblock. Go.
“Well, well, well,” he said.
“Well!” Rachel sat up. “I’ve
been waiting.”
“And who’s this strapping young man?” Cheddar asked.
“And who’s this strapping young man?” Cheddar asked.
“This… is Amanda’s Brother.”
“I’m—”
“Who’s Amanda?”
“Whose party this is. You’ve met
her before—she was at Halloween, remember? Made out with that black
kid Tyler?” Rachel turned to me. “Are her and Tyler like?” She
turned back to Cheddar before I could answer, “She’s got red
hair…”
“Oh. Oh! Hello! I love your house. I
like homes like this. With a homely sort of feel to them? Not some
loveless Mcmansion. But this place, you can feel it—there’s life
here. People freaking live here, you know? Real people.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I said
quietly.
“I think it’s tragic,” Rachel
said. “The straightness. I feel like I’m in a sitcom.”
“That’s because you’ve never had
a home.” Cheddar said. “This home is real. You’ve confused the
lie with the truth you’re so used to the lie.”
“It’s true.” Rachel turned to
me. “I wouldn’t know a home if I was sitting in the living room
of one. I was born to a teenage mother with a heroin addiction. She
tried to love me but only had room in her heart for the heroin.
That’s what she named me. Heroin. She really loved heroin. Sang
songs about it; I remember those songs—they were my nursery rhymes.
But my foster parents changed my name to Rachel, which was also the
name of their ferret.”
“Which explains a lot,” Cheddar
said. “That ferret keeps showing up in her dreams. Oh—
I’m her dream therapist, nice to meet
you. I’m not licensed though; I’m obligated to say that.”
“He’s helping me deal with the
ferret. Also the one where I drop my car keys but can’t pick them
up because my hands are giant cubes.”
“The ferret is always popping up,”
Cheddar said. “At the end of every dream, waits the ferret.”
“Like right when I’m about to grab
my keys, guess who jumps out of a dumpster and snatches them?”
“I’m serious,” Rachel said,
“Guess.”
“The ferret?”
“Wow, he’s good.” Rachel said.
She smiled at Cheddar.
“I’ve spent years of my life
training as a dream therapist to do what you just did,” Cheddar
said. “Amazing.”
Just like that, I was the third wheel
and I was flat. They were speaking their own language, exchanging
lines of their own private play—and performing was what they were
doing. I supposed the punch line might have been me—but it felt
emptier than that. They played an esoteric, private game with no
meaning, or target. I couldn’t tell whether they were lying or
not—about the heroin thing, about the ferret thing. I could never
really tell when someone was lying.
Rachel stood up awkwardly, swinging her
cast out of my lap. I felt naked and empty without the leg cast in
my lap; I had come close to something great only for it to be
snatched away. I felt like a silver medalist. I shifted, trying to
hide my erection, which, in the absence of the weight of the college
girl’s foot, was already whimpering, shrinking in defeat.
I wasn’t willing to accept that she
was getting away. If I could keep up with them—maybe she’s still
interested? She hugged him, the one they called Cheddar, but I wasn’t
getting a romantic vibe. They were sexless, blankly platonic; could
have been brother and sister.
Other kids crowded around Cheddar;
ignored Rachel, but adored Cheddar. I realized later that this was
because he was the man with the drugs. People like that man. He was a
sort of celebrity. While Cheddar entertained them, Rachel whispered
in my ear if there was a place private they could go? No no no—she
assured me, seeing the disappointment on my face, she had her hand on
my shoulder; she had green nail polish; her mouth was so big so
close—not to fuck or anything. They had mushies and didn’t want
to take them out in front of these vultures, for obvious reasons,
they being vultures.
Mushies? I thought. I realized that, in
a careful way, she was inviting me to join them.
#
Amanda and I had sealed off The Parents
room, hanging crime scene tape across the door. That was the one
major rule: no going in there. Everyone had been cool about it since
it was the only rule. I had other rules but Amanda only had that one.
Since my rules were being broken, I broke hers.
It felt weird, bad, going in there:
like I’d just cracked open an ancient tomb. I was violating
something sacred. But I reminded myself that I didn’t give a fuck.
I turned the light on to brush away the melancholic shadow that hung
over the room like a noose, but the light was worse, somehow: in the
absence of The Parents, their room was unbearably lifeless; haunted
with the spirits of domestic failings, of a crumbled family—more a
crumbled idea than an actual thing. We closed the door and the room
took on an eerie sort of quiet, except for the muffled music (there
were like 4 different songs playing from different parts of the
house, combining into this dull omnipresent thumping) and hollering
outside the door, and the air-conditioner blowing heavy above us. It
was cold in there. It was like standing in a Raymond Carver story.
“You have to,” Cheddar said,
“everyone has to at least once. It’s a life changing experience.
A lifesaving experience!” He was talking about hallucinogenic
mushrooms. Shrooms, as he called them—or as the girls call them:
mushies.
“Cheddar really believes in the
sanctity of psychedelics. He makes Timothy Leary look like a
sceptic,” Rachel said.
“What’s it like?” I asked. Was I
really going to do this? Part of me knew it was a bad idea, but the
idea of escaping myself—changing my inside, going to a world of
rainbows and lights, and going there with Rachel… tripping
together, maybe the mushrooms were like ecstasy? I imagined us lying
in bed, whispering to each other. I wondered about my sister, what
she would say. Definitely not a good idea Nick, I could hear her
voice. Better let me confiscate these.
“It’s not like in the movies,”
Rachel said, “how people turn into lizards, or you hallucinate that
a giant spider’s about to eat you.”
“No,” Cheddar said. “The trip
happens internally. That’s the misconception. People think
psychedelics alter everything around you, but really they alter your
inside. Remember you’re not hallucinating. You’re just finally
seeing the real.”
“The real?”
“The truth, my man. That illusive
thing. These—here—these are the key.”
Rachel was already scarfing hers down,
a disgusted cringe on her face. The mushrooms looked like shrunken
little brains. I put one in my mouth. No going back now. “Gross,
huh?” Rachel said.
I shrugged, and ate another. “It
doesn’t taste like anything, really.” It tasted like dirt, maybe.
I ate the third one. “It tastes like old popcorn,” I said. “What
if I have a bad trip?”
“Don’t,” Rachel said. “Seriously,
just don’t.”
“Don’t fight it,” Cheddar said.
“Whatever you do. Don’t fight. Give up control, just flow.”
“A bad trip—you’re stuck in a
nightmare,” Rachel just had to add. “It’s like your parents are
slowly being skinned alive in front of you and there’s nothing you
can do, but watch.”
“Jeez,” I said, “thanks for
that.”
“Don’t freak him out,” Cheddar
said. “No Bad Vibes. This is now a Bad Vibe-free zone.”
The three of us waited, hung out in my
parent’s room. We lay on the bed, elbow to elbow, my body against
Rachel’s. I liked the feeling of her waist against mine. I bounced
my shoe against her cast. It took about twenty minutes. “I’m
starting to feel it,” Rachel said. “I feel like I’m glowing. Am
I glowing, ha ha?” I was feeling it too. The nature of time was
changing, distending—my first clue that eight hours of mushroom
time was much, much longer. The clock ticked audibly, yet it was
digital. I was melting. My body was expanding, like a puddle—my
puddle mixing with hers. We were forming into one ticklish entity. I
didn’t know what belonged to me and what was hers. I really liked
this. Rachel was laughing in my ear, the laughter felt like a tongue
licking me, and in my mind it was the laughter of a small child, a
little girl, running around a sunny garden in a dream. The room had
expanded—the distance between the bed and the TV was a great
canyon, our feet hanging out over the edge, a steep drop. The ceiling
would not stay put. Those little shapes became characters, cartoons.
The stories began to unfold across the unfurling ceiling. Princess
Peach smiled at me. I could hear the sound of men at work: hammers
against stone. They were yelling to each other in Egyptian. They were
digging under my pillowcase. The pyramids were being built inside my
pillow! I realized Rachel was patting my chest. I was drooling. My
heart grew wings and raged against my ribcage, its oppressor. It had
to escape, my heart did. Cheddar was miles away on the other side of
Rachel singing. Beautifully. Was he singing? Or chanting something,
some ancient spell… Was Rachel glowing? I looked at her. Her face
had tracers of previous faces—rapidly changing, shifting, morphing.
She looked like a bull, like the bull on Wall Street. She huffed two
big cartoon puffs of smoke from her nostrils. Rachel’s face rippled
into a wide, lupine smile. A nightmarish pang went off like a clock
at midnight, rang across the hollow room. And I knew that she was
bad, bad and in my parent’s room. Oh no, I thought gravely. It was
going bad already; I withered; I was losing control. Already. “Am I
glowing?” she asked. Her eyes were demonic pupils the size of black
moons. I had lost control.
Here my memory gets blurry, convoluted.
I remember Cheddar saying, “Whoa, relax.”
I remember Rachel, a moon-sized face
right next to mine, examining me, me in a state of stasis on the
floor, saying, “I think he’s broken.”
#
Somehow, I wound up in the bathroom,
where I was lost for twenty years. I went in there to barf, and I did
barf, and I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a dead me: skinny,
pale, nothing but bones and a deflated mop of hair. I fell out of
space-time. I saw twenty years into the future—the rest of my life.
At age 35, I foresaw that I would die in a random,
life-is-just-unlucky-sometimes car accident. Such an anticlimactic
way to die; pointless, random—all those years spent hobbling
around, searching for food and meaning, adding up to nothing. I saw
everything for the hopeless terror it is. I bit into the truth. I’d
lived my whole life thinking the world was ahead of me—that I’d
wake up one morning, and be who I wanted to be. I was young and
special, I thought, and good things were coming to me. But nothing
was, really. I saw that in the mirror. The youthful illusion of
tomorrow shattered, and I was really too young for that to shatter.
I thought about my parents, who had
abandoned me. And how our family was over, and how the world was.
There was knocking on the door.
Something malicious. Here to punish me. It was the cops and they were
angry. I had to get out of there. No no it wasn’t the cops. The
pigs were the least of my worries. Outside were demons who had
attached themselves to the property after the family died. They were
fire. The house was on fire. I stared up at the burning ceiling, saw
the smoke rising in the black universe. It became very clear to me
what I had to do; everything became clear, as I hid behind the
toilet.
#
“Whoa, Nick, what’re you doing?”
I was pointing the fire extinguisher at
the crowd. People were grabbing their coats, drugs, heading out the
door. The house was on fire and I had to put it out. Kids stopped and
looked at me, laughing, Alice in Wonderland cat grins on their faces.
The fire extinguisher was big and red, its hose a trunk; it was a
living thing, had a brain. Red—my smiling attack dog. “Get out!”
Laughter, but they were leaving. I saw
Rachel and Cheddar, they looked bewilderedly at me, and then at each
other, and then they hurried out. My sister tiptoed toward me like a
hostage negotiator. Whispering do not, do not, buddy. But Red and I
knew what had to be done.
“How do you use this thing?” I
said. “Shoot,” I commanded. “Or do you not want to?” I asked
Red. I didn’t know how to make him go.
“Nick, get down from the fucking
table before you fall.” Amanda grabbed the fire extinguisher—I
tried to wrestle it from her, and tragically, in slow motion, I fell
off the table and crashed down against the kitchen floor. It felt
like I had fallen from an airplane holding a defunct parachute. It
wasn’t that bad of a fall, in actuality—but I thought it had
killed me: the clap of my shoulder against the floor: the creaky door
of death opening.
I hallucinated myself dead—floating
up out of my body and toward a white light. There I saw my
grandparents, and my goldfish Geronimo, and Jesus told me welcome to
the party, and stuck his tongue into his nose and rolled his eyes up
into his head and began to shuffle back and forth, a little dance. He
made that face and did that dance for everyone who made it to Heaven.
My parents were there, too. You guys are dead? ‘Fraid so, Dad said.
But we’re happier now, Mom said. Much happier, Dad agreed.
Now that we’re gone.
#
Eventually we got the house cleared
out, and it was only me and my sister left standing, hopeless
survivors in a devastating mess. “This place is destroyed.”
“I know,” Amanda said. I began to
cry.
The house was beyond repair—it looked
like it had been the target of a drone strike. Cups and beer cans
strewn everywhere, dirty dishes inhabited by nests of flies and
maggots (there were no flies or maggots), the walls scribbled all
over with anarchist and satanic graffiti (the walls hadn’t been
touched), family heirlooms were stolen (nothing was stolen except for
a stray twenty dollar bill from my Mom’s drawer, and I think I know
who took it). Amanda held me and promised that we could fix it. “We
can clean it,” she promised.
“No we can’t,” I said. I was
coming down from the nightmare trip, swollen with maudlin. So she got
out the cleaning supplies. “Watch us,” she said. Together we
started cleaning things up. This helped me. I was pouring my heart
out to Amanda, telling her all the truths I had uncovered. She said
later that she didn’t understand a word I was saying.
“Mom and Dad are dead.”
“Nick—what the fuck?”
“I saw them. In heaven. So it’s
good they’re there at least.”
“No… They’re both fine, Nick. I’m
the one who’s going to be dead when they get home. If you love me
and want me to live out the remainder of my life in just a wheelchair
or something, don’t tell them you took mushrooms? I seriously think
they’d kick me out. I probably deserve to be. And I’m not blaming
you for this, Nick. But I can’t believe you did that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t blame you and I’m not
mad—well I am—but you’re in a safe place and I love you”—she’d
been reading on the internet how to calm down someone who was having
a bad trip—“but seriously? What were you thinking? You can’t do
those kinds of drugs at your age. Your brain is still developing.
It’s not healthy.”
“You’re only three years older than
me,” I reminded her.
“Yeah but three years is a big
difference. In the brain.” She pointed at her skull.
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
She hit me with the broom. That was
nice. That was like something a brother and sister would do. “But I
love you, though,” she said. “And you’re safe.” She hit me
with the broom again.
As I scrubbed not-there shoeprints from
the floor, reality would fleetingly return. I remembered that my
parents were getting a divorce: that was real and that was happening.
It was almost relieving, to know that something was real and
happening. “Will we keep the house?” I asked. “Do you think Dad
will move into an apartment nearby or something? Or will Mom? Mom’s
the one who always sleeps on the couch, so maybe she’ll be the one
who moves out.”
Amanda’s eyes were tired and morose.
She only shrugged. I went outside and cleaned up an apple that had
been debauched into a smoking device sitting on the back porch. When
I came back in, Amanda said, “Do you remember when we stayed at
Aunt Margaret’s house that summer. You were like seven, so maybe
not?”
“I do,” I said. “I do!” I was
so happy to remember. I was once a child; I once existed.
“We kept thinking they were going to
send us home. But they never did,” Amanda said. We didn’t want to
go home. Aunt Margaret had two kids that mirrored us: one was
Amanda’s age, and one was mine. It was the world’s longest,
greatest sleepover. “One night I overheard Aunt Marge talking on
the phone with grandma. Turns out we were only there because things
were pretty nasty between The Parents. Marge was talking about like a
custody battle and… she said that she’d talked to Mom, and we
were going to stay with her for the whole school year. That was plan.
We’d go to school with Kyle and Sarah while The Parents got
everything sorted out. I remember her talking about how Uncle Robby
was going to beat up Dad, teach him a lesson. Don’t know what that
was about, still don’t. That part really scared me, though.”
I had stopped cleaning. I suddenly felt
very sober. Amanda had stopped cleaning, too. “I tried to shrug it
off,” Amanda said, “but a few minutes later I like broke down. I
went downstairs and Aunt Margaret was watching TV. ‘Hi sweety,’
she said; she had no idea I’d overheard. She said, ‘I was going
to talk to you and your brother about something—’ and I just
burst out crying. I was a blubbering mess. Just pathetic. She kept
asking me what was wrong, and I kept saying that I wanted to go
home—I missed my mom and dad, my room, blah blah blah. I guess
Margy relayed how homesick I was to Mom—probably told her she has
to get her shit together, for our sake. And that, I guess, stalled
the divorce. They missed us too, maybe. So the whole thing was swept
under the rug.”
“It’s easier to sweep things under
the rug,” I said, uncovering another truth.
“It is. And I would have stayed if I
hadn’t overheard that phone call, you know? If I thought they were
letting us stay because the schools were better in Washington or
something? We’d have been a lot better off, I think. I mean look at
us: I think we’re the worst case scenario.” She laughed,
bitterly.
“We would have come home
eventually,” I said.
“Maybe.”
#
My sister snores like my father. She
also takes up the whole couch and so I moved to the floor, watching
reruns of The Cosby Show. I was coming down from the drugs, but still
couldn’t sleep. I knew that everything would be, at least, O.K.,
because of the building light behind the gray sick morning sky. The
present had returned to me, mostly. I was still seeing things when I
closed my eyes so I focused on the reruns. I realized that sitcoms
were the best, most important thing ever. No one has truly understood
the importance of sitcoms like I did in that moment. Because sitcoms,
especially reruns, are always there. The sitcom family bravely
confronts the American life head-on over the course of 22 minutes,
taking breaks only for early-morning infomercials. At the end of the
episode, the struggle will be resolved, and they, the sitcom family,
will keep going, endlessly unbroken. Reset to their default state.
How comforting.
End
