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Michael and Abby drove in separate cars to Chili’s, where they faced each other across a slab of varnished table and ordered frozen margaritas. The food arrived sizzling on black cast-iron trays, and Michael set upon his ravenously. He’d grown fond of Chili’s; the enormity of the portions, the sense that there would always be more regardless of how much one ate—even the predictability of the food instilled in him a deep comfort. He’d developed a monstrous new appetite; it had driven him back to McDonald’s many times, where the cheap food stuccoed his insides, plugging the holes of his hunger. He’d eaten at Burger King and Wendy’s and Arby’s and Taco Bell, had drunk nondairy shakes that were said to contain flour, gobbled onion rings, chicken nuggets, fish sandwiches, synthetic ice cream, until all that remained of his old revulsion was a slight frisson of wickedness as he gorged himself. A new layer of softness had begun to float above his bones where once the skin had stretched tight. Not fat, but a harbinger of fat. He would stand before the mirror and study this new stratum of himself, a widening and settling in his face that amounted to natural disguise. Soon he would begin to exercise, jogging along manicured sidewalks, huffing among rows of tulips, running in circles and then straining to lift hundreds of pounds of weights, cultivating muscles that would adhere to him like expensive clothing. And then his infiltration would be complete.
Except now. Today, a silly joy flopped at my heart as I drove past the Clocktower Hotel with its “Museum of Time,” past the “Welcome to Rockford” sign, past the Courtyard Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Bombay Bicycle Club, Burger King, Country Kitchen, Red Roof Inn, Gerry’s Pizza, Mobil, Century 21, Merrill Lynch, Lowe’s Gardening and Home Depot. I felt proud of Rockford for appearing on cue and playing its part with such conviction. I had told Irene it would be blighted, bloated, vacant, and now Rockford heaped upon us a quintessentially awful American landscape, the sort of vista that left Europeans ashen-faced: flat, hangar-sized windowless buildings; a swarm of garish plastic signs; miles of parking lot crammed with big American cars throwing jabs of sunlight off their fenders and hubcaps. It was a land without people, save for a few insect-sized humans sprinkled among the parking lots like stand-ins from an architectural scale model, humans diminished to quasi-nonexistence by the gargantuan buildings and giant midwestern sky, pale blue, dotted with tufts of cloud, vast and domineering as skies in Africa.
Our salads arrived on a rink-sized tray, and as the waitress dispensed the cut crystal bowls, Irene left her chair to get a couple of shots of the family at dinner. As she focused the camera, I glanced into her open notebook, prising apart the knots of her script to see what she could possibly have found to write about Saucy the cat. lost, I read. intense and piercing sadness. Further down the page, I saw fantasy of drowning.
“Smile everyone,” Irene said, and I did, I looked into her despairing eyes and I smiled.
why is this so sharp
At sunset, Manhattan shimmered like a single thing, a beaten piece of gold or some mythical animal flicking its pink feathers in the sun, and beside its ravishing silhouette the steps Aziz and his compatriots were taking seemed too small: amassing drums of nitroglycerine and ammonia and fertilizer in a nearby family’s basement; stacking them behind an upended plastic swimming pool in whose turquoise basin they would eventually fold them into gallons of petrol, using a canoe paddle to stir. Bemoaning the fact that Wall Street had been made a pedestrian zone to protect it from suicide bombers. Collecting bits of pipe for detonators. Useless. Useless and small. Like Jersey City itself, which had looked so near to Manhattan on the map as to be the same place, as good as there, Aziz had told himself in English, practicing, but that had proved an error of perspective that you could only make from afar.
The riverfront park was still the most populous place—her old haunt, where children wobbled on training wheels and flabby guys played volleyball on rectangles of orange sand. The water twitched with motor boats and jet skis. She rode north to Shorewood Park and the water-ski jump, then south to the YMCA, her stomach seizing each time she approached it because she half expected to see Michael West sitting cross-legged by the river. His arm in a sling. She craved this—to begin the story again, like re-entering a dream. But it wouldn’t be the same. Something had shifted, broken in her. When she thought of herself a year ago she remembered a girl flush with outsized hopes, a girl who believed the world had made secret arrangements in her favor. Charlotte hated her.
He’d been alone in the car that day, or he likely wouldn’t have noticed something amiss on the grassy embankment beside the interstate, would not have pulled over onto the shoulder in the first place. A bitch nursing a few pups, it turned out to be—a cur, a mutt—what was she doing there? His car on the shoulder, the dog and her wretched pups sprawled panting in the longish, blighted grass, and for some reason (and here was the gap, the stitch, the missing step in Moose’s personal history) for some reason, rather than get back inside his car and continue home, rather than haul dog and pups into the backseat and drop them off somewhere more hospitable, Moose had left his car parked beside the interstate (dangerously) and climbed the parched, grassy slope that hugged the overpass, climbed without knowing why, then sat immobilized looking down at the traffic, hypnotized by the flux and flow that had surrounded him only minutes before, a crush of humanity in whose midst he had subsisted blindly, un-reflexively until that moment. Hours passed, so many that when he looked again, the bitch and her pups had vanished. He lay on his back in the grass and let the sky push against his face. From somewhere came the whistle of a train. And Moose had understood that it was over: the trains, the factories—the world of objects was gone and imagery was ascendant, whirling over tiny filaments of connection he could actually hear amassing hungrily, invisibly beneath the soil. Wires that weren’t even wires. Information that lived on the very air.
“I was thinking of … of Hawaii,” he said, the very word a yelp of fear. Moose leapt, threw himself from this cliff. “How does that sound to you?”
There was a long pause, during which he fell, fell, swiveling his limbs in the open air. But when Priscilla looked at him again, he saw renewal. Resurgence. A flame lighting her face. Faith returned to his wife like a soul reanimating a corpse. Moose sank back in his seat and shut his eyes.
The world was saved, after all.
Priscilla took his hand. “Hawaii would be wonderful,” she said.
She sat on the floor, away from the charcoal couch. When Kyle shed his army jacket, Phoebe noticed through his T-shirt how muscular he was. He took a joint from a Lucite cigarette holder on the coffee table and fired it up, then lowered himself to the floor.
feels too flat
At twenty-three, Phoebe’s brother was a millionaire. The seed of his wealth had been their father’s five thousand dollars, engorged by careful investments while Barry was at Berkeley. After graduation he’d used the money to start a software company, and when Phoebe last asked, his employees had numbered fifty-seven. He owned a four-bedroom house in the hills outside Los Gatos, and showered Phoebe each holiday with gifts that left her weak with gratitude, a Prince tennis racket, a digital watch, a string of real pearls that radiated a faint pink glow in certain lights. Barry often dropped the names of important people he’d met at parties, always stressing how they’d sought him out, how some moment of unique communication had transpired. According to Barry, his employees were off the genius charts, his products so phenomenally great that customers were nearly fainting away at their computer terminals. Against her better judgment, Phoebe found herself believing him sometimes, adopting Barry’s view that the center of the world was not New York or Paris or Washington, D.C., but a software company near Palo Alto.
no real notes here, just thought this was funny [also remember that she dated steve jobs lol]
Faith kept glancing at their father, fidgeting with the straps of her bathing suit. Finally she rose to her feet. With dread in her face she walked slowly to the highest diving board and climbed its steps. She looked tiny up there, eleven years old, slim and deeply tanned, slightly knock-kneed. “Dad,” Barry said. Their father opened his eyes and rubbed them, followed Phoebe’s and Barry’s stares and sat upright, muscles tense in his neck. Faith stood a long time at the end of the diving board. A few teenagers waited impatiently below, craning their necks to see what was taking so long. Please do it, Phoebe thought. Please, please do it. Faith gave a tentative bounce. Then a clarity came to her movements, a stillness; she leapt high in the air, spread wide her arms and arced into a swan dive, head straight down like an arrow’s head, pulling the wand of her body toward the turquoise water. Her splash was minute—in years to come Faith would never again match that first, perfect dive, a fact that galled her—and their father leapt to his feet. “That’s it!” he cried. “Jesus, you see what she did?” He was grinning, his despair gone, and Phoebe knew the day was saved.