Killing Time in Crystal City Read online

  Jasper had e-mailed me twice. Once, the day I left.

  J: Are you all right? That’s all I want to know. Actually, I want to know a shitload more than that. But, are you all right?

  Then, the next day.

  J: How could you run off, on the very day you finally became an insider?

  At that instant I became horrifyingly aware of being in a glass room in the middle of a public building. I swiveled around in my chair so hard in my self-defeating desperation to seem casual that I did nearly a complete three-sixty before stopping myself again. This caught the eye of the librarian, the only other person in the place. I waved too happily when she looked too concerned.

  Back to the computer, and the climate control did me no good now. I started to sweat, at the hairline and back of the neck, and I got a bit of the shakes like I was right there and then in the middle of some crazed and dangerously taboo activity.

  I was right in thinking I needed to be out of Jasper’s orbit just now. I could freak myself out just fine without his working at it.

  Dad also wrote that first day.

  D: I am petrified and mortified and owe you a lot of things, but first I just need to hear from you so I can stop worrying about you.

  Huh. Worried about me, was he? Well, what do you know? Shame. He’ll probably get over it.

  When he did not hear back from me, he started getting in touch on a surprisingly regular basis. Again, huh, imagine that.

  D: Please?

  And thank you.

  D: I know that you are out there. I know that you can hear me.

  Was he building bridges here, or preparing to chase me through the woods with a meat cleaver?

  D: Son? I have done everything wrong. I realize that now. Son?

  Not fair. Jeez. He shouldn’t have called me that. There should be rules. He should be able to lose the right until earning it back, like stripes in the army.

  And it shouldn’t have worked on me, either. It shouldn’t have given me butterflies, that was just pathetic.

  Did the man have a lot of time for me all of a sudden, now that I was gone?

  I shut down the computer, keeping my thoughts for myself, and left the library.

  ALL KINDS OF TIRED

  I ring the bell and I knock on the door and I ring the bell and I knock on the door until I am guaranteed to be either answered or arrested.

  I feel like I have achieved both, when Stacey comes to the door.

  “What are you doing, knucklehead?” she says, exasperated.

  “I’m coming calling, what do you think? Where you guys been? Come on out to play.” And this is where I get all slick and cool. “Where’s Molly, anyway?”

  “We’ve been working, actually,” she says, and looks tired enough that it’s probably true. “And because we don’t have an uncle looking out for us, with his steaks and his glistening porcelain and his amazing soft bathrobes and whatever all else for luxuries, we have to work consistently if we want to sleep under a roof consistently.”

  “C’mon, Stacey. What’s going on? What’s the matter? All I want is to see you guys. What’s wrong with that? We’re a tribe, right? Let’s just be a tribe. . . . Let’s just go someplace—”

  “No!” she snaps. “I am someplace. I mean, it’s no place but it’s someplace and I need to be here. Most people don’t have the kind of freedom you seem to have.”

  This is the first time I have witnessed such a short fuse on Stacey. It is a sad sight in the shadow of her more rollicking regular self.

  “Right,” I say. “We should probably talk another time. You’re obviously having a bad day.”

  “They’re all bad, you fool. I have no home. I’m in here scrubbing toilets and pulling three-foot-long snakes of human hair and mucus and eel jelly out of drains because the goodly folks in charge keep reminding me I’ll be out on my ear if I don’t. And for the comedy kicker, I’m forced to go to church every morning to pray and thank Him for the privilege and good fortune of it all.”

  It’s the kind of thing you can’t really respond to, even if you have a response. Which, I don’t.

  “Sorry about all that, Stacey. But, maybe Molly—”

  “She’s not here, Kiki, all right? She’s not here, and she’s not going to be here. She stayed out again, and she lost her place and that was that, but she doesn’t care, because she’s living with Billy now, so she wasn’t bothered about that at all. Right? You get it? She thinks that this Billy is just the big everything and so good luck to her and God bless her and whatever. People never stay in these places for very long anyway and in fact I’m not long for this one myself now.”

  “What? No, it’s too soon. Don’t leave already. I only just met you.”

  She looks about to growl at me but then her face muscles shift a little and soften and I think she feels somewhat sorry for me, which is fine, which will do just fine.

  “I have to get back to work, Kiki, or these people are gonna make the decision for me.”

  “Okay, okay, then you should go. Will I see you later?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe. I don’t know. Right now I’m just . . . tired. All kinds of tired.”

  “What about Molly?”

  She shrugs again. “What about her? She’s gonna do what she’s gonna do.”

  “But . . . but, I thought . . .”

  “Don’t think that.”

  “But, no. You don’t understand. It was special. It was different. She was—”

  “She has been looking for you, though,” Stacey says, the nicest words coming through a hard-knuckle delivery that feels like a backhander dope slap.

  “What? See? Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Because what she wants is to borrow your book. Your father’s poetry. I wasn’t sure you’d find that the most pleasant development.”

  “My father’s book?” I say weakly.

  “She wants to show it to Billy. Soulful-sensitive type, apparently, though if you asked me, I’d say when he looks in a mirror there’s nobody looking back, but what do I know. So I guess she wants to read to him, from your dad’s poetry. And maybe he’ll read some to her, too. Fucking sweet, huh?”

  I guess Dad’s collection ranges a fair bit beyond his classic, “Could Kevin from Heaven/Really be Seven?”

  Stacey’s eyes are going cold-stare as she speaks, and her voice is losing power.

  “You being deliberately nasty to me, Stacey?”

  “Yes, I am. Because I can’t be bothered to work up the energy to support your fantasy life at the moment. Rich boy goes slumming, sweeps troubled street chick off her feet, blah blah blah. And your naïveté is getting tedious so I’m trying to help you get through it quicker and get to your fucking manhood already so I can get back to, you know, life the real thing.”

  I am physically recoiling from her, backing down the stairs. She keeps looking at me as I do and I think I see the softening again, the better thing inside her, and some regret for the unkindness. I know that is in there, in her.

  And yet. How the hell would I know that?

  “Rich?” I say with pleading hands as I look up at her from the sidewalk. “I got nothing, just like you. I am just like you.”

  Her response is an almighty slam of the door.

  FUNNY THING

  I always thought libraries were merely books. And, maybe, free passes to the science museum.

  And I always thought they were just dotted, here, maybe there, and okay one more there. The way chunks of dough are distributed in low-price cookie-dough ice cream just enough to be legitimate but not enough to make you really believe.

  That was when I lived in other places, though. In other people’s places.

  Now, since I am living in a Crystal place that feels mine, in a life that feels mine, where nobody is overseeing me and I have to notice for myself .
. . well, it’s changed.

  Libraries pop up where you need them. They magically materialize at just the point where you think, This neighborhood could use a . . .

  I suppose they were possibly there all along. Maybe I failed to notice, when I didn’t need to notice.

  Now I notice. It’s no more than a block away from Stacey’s hostel, on the very route I walked to get there, and it did not show itself before.

  “Are those computers for anybody to use?” I ask the solitary librarian.

  “No,” she says, “not just anybody . . .”

  I don’t even care who trained them to say that, or if they were in a huge auditorium with six hundred librarians repeating after him, “not just anybody . . .” I will look forward to hearing that in every library everywhere from now on.

  I log on.

  J: You did nothing wrong. No matter what you are thinking, you did nothing wrong.

  Please come home.

  Nice finish. You would think that the stupid, childish, pathetic welling up and welling over that my eyes are doing would be triggered by the words “Please come home,” written by my friend when until recently I did not have one actual friend to my knowledge. But no, it’s even stupider and more childish and more pathetic because I started losing it back at “you did nothing wrong.”

  And then there’s the other one.

  D: I canceled it. Canceled it all. Made a great, glorious mess, is what I did. A whole country, Peru, is mad at me, and it appears I am facing legal action of some kind from Michelle whose plans I have ruined, but I damn well dammit did it.

  Funny thing. In some uncomfortable ways—financial, professional, social, etc.—this feels like the mayhem of breakdowns past.

  But this time I don’t feel bad. This time I feel like I did the better thing, consequences be damned.

  I’m in my chair now, son. Settled and waiting for you to come back.

  Like I should have been doing all along. Like I will continue to do.

  Please come home.

  My face is buried in my hands as I sense the librarian inch up next to me, professional-close but not weirdo close, and I feel like screaming out for her to get away from me but I am also screaming in to please, please don’t go away.

  When did these places become so complicated?

  TRIBAL

  The rain is merely mist when I join the guys again on the beach. They are sitting inside the raft now, and the three of them raise a big cheer as I approach them.

  “Well, allll riiiiight!” Mickey whoops.

  “Yeah,” yelps Howard.

  “Whoa ho,” shouts Tailbone.

  Now, this is more like it. It feels nice to be appreciated. Even though they might be stoned enough to think I’m somebody else.

  Killing time here on Crystal Beach is not something you have to do, because it basically seems to kill itself. Time suicide. That sounds like a bad thing but it’s not. In fact, it’s a compliment. You slip into it, this Crystal reality, this pace that works for people with nowhere really to go. And before you have really clocked what’s happening, not only have many hours chewed themselves right off the clock, but the beach itself has evolved and improved, till it’s the equal of anybody else’s beach, and you are damned well ready to fight to defend its honor.

  People who at first glance you were snorting at become people whose company you now value.

  All manner of folk suddenly make sense. There are all manner of tribes outside and beyond the ones I had always known and failed to fit. I won’t always fail to fit, I know that now.

  “I wouldn’t ever want to live in a house again,” Tailbone says as he passes me the wine. I simply cannot stand up to as much smoke as these guys do, so eventually I volunteered to spring for a few bottles if one of the legal-age guys would go and get it. Howard is the oldest, at twenty-three, but more important he has the grizzled thing from when he was in the army, and the oft-broken nose and fingers and leathery outdoors face. He has a liquor store face, and is probably always the guy who does the run.

  “Why not?” I ask. I feel now like I really want to know these things, about this life. I haven’t even done anything wrong, and Stacey’s made me feel ashamed and exposed and like I need to retake and pass an important test on the subject.

  “Because all the time I lived in a house, with my ma and dad and all those little shit brothers and sisters, then later with my roommates, then, prison, I realized that all those years, all of them, I was always so tense, always like, crazed with the tension. And that was what made me mental, is what I think. Made me do all them things I shouldn’ta wanted to do. And from what all I saw of the people I was locked in with, in all those places, they all had exactly the same problem that was doggin’ me. Every single person I ever lived with acted in a way that made me want to shoot ’em right in the head. Everybody feels that way, for sure. Tension, man, tension everywhere.”

  “And this,” I say, “comes down to being indoors?”

  “Exactly,” Tailbone says excitedly. “Exactly, exactly. You said that so well, Kiki man. Wow, it’s so great to have a intellectual guy hangin’ with us, isn’t it, guys?”

  “Yeah,” Howard says, raising one of the other wine bottles.

  “Yeah,” Mickey says, on his knees tending our modest, discreet campfire.

  The weather cleared for a while and then veered back in the direction of wet and uncomfortable as the night got deep. It’s made it difficult to keep a decent flame going, but it’s also kept the numbers down here on the beach, so that is a fair exchange in my mind.

  I have never seen the beach this quiet. Even with us yammering away, the modest sound of the surf slurp is with us all the time.

  “I even like the rain,” Tailbone says.

  “I do too,” I say, then I tip the wine bottle way back and gulp big, to murmurs of support from my crew.

  “Frisbee,” Mickey says out of nowhere, and everyone responds by jumping up.

  Oh. Well. Maybe jumping is a bit ambitious right now. My legs do a wobble and I am almost down crosslegged in the dirty mud-sand again. But I catch myself, give my head a strong doggy-at-the-beach shake, and I am ready to join the guys for Frisbee.

  The guys who, by the way, suffered none of my shakiness despite having pounded themselves with at least three times as much of anything as I did. I find myself aspiring to their hardcoreness, even as the thought unsettles me, and my stomach.

  I give myself a full-body doggy shake as I get in the Frisbee rotation.

  “I think we should get a dog,” I say as I catch my first throw. I drop it, of course, pick it up, and pass to Howard.

  “Awesome idea,” Howard says, passing on to Mickey.

  “That is a lot of responsibility,” Mickey-the-Dad says, passing to Tailbone.

  “Dogs suck,” says Tailbone, passing sharply to me.

  “Listen,” Mickey says serenely, “we’ll think about it, Kiki, okay. I can’t make any promises, but we’ll consider maybe getting ourselves a dog at some point.”

  “But we already have Howard,” Tailbone shouts.

  Howard takes off on what probably feels like a ferocious bull charge to him but looks from the outside like a lanky penguin running with his head down. He barely grazes Tailbone, goes tumbling right past him and down into the sand. Then Tailbone drops down on top of him. A form of wrestling ensues.

  “C’mon,” Mickey says, tugging me by the shirt to walk with him down to the water’s edge.

  The rain is refusing to be ignored now. But it’s still somehow not hard to live with it, despite the fact my previous feeling about any precipitation was that it was a curse sent down to smite me personally for whatever transgressions I had committed. This evening I feel like I’m sharing it, and that it’s a benign presence.

  “Do you skip rocks?” Mickey says.

  It is
mostly dark now. There is enough light left that you could see the crests of waves or the ticks of a good flat rock across the surface of an otherwise invisible sea. But mostly, visibility really isn’t much.

  “Is that some kind of freaky code you’re speaking now, Mick?” I ask with high comic seriousness.

  He pauses the pause of a smart guy on dope.

  “I wasn’t,” he says thoughtfully. “But that’s pretty good. It’s funny, right. And it fits, too. Which is why it’s good. Nice work.”

  “Thanks. I try.”

  “But if you wanna speak that code, we could do that, too.”

  Oh. A seriously inadvertent turn there. Jeez, now what have I done?

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I say.

  He is crouched down, there in the dark sand under the dark sky, raking around for flat rocks, presumably.

  “I don’t know. Depends what you think I’m saying. What do you think I’m saying? Maybe you should just say it.”

  “Ah, that’s what you would like me to do, isn’t it? I’m falling right into your trap. You get your jollies making me say what it is I think you’re saying. Then, you practically don’t even have to say it because I’ve done it all for you.”

  Mickey looks up at me, with a clutch of rocks in one hand as he balances his crouch with the other. “Is this another code? ’Cause I think I fell behind here.”

  I extend my hand to give him a lift up, even though I’m not exactly the rock of steadiness myself.

  “Nah, man. I was just saying that yes, I used to skip rocks like a champion, but haven’t in a long time. And right now my equilibrium is in a state where, it’s not the best time to try again.”

  He seems—then I realize, pretends—to be working hard to decipher my words.

  “Right, so you used to skip. But you don’t anymore.”

  “Correct.”

  “Funny, I’m the opposite. I never used to skip. I was dead against that shit, man. Then, gradually, when I was living on the streets I became more . . . universal. Call it the enlightenment of deprivation maybe, but I decided after a while that if somebody wants to love you, let ’em. Today, I skip all the time.”