Killing Time in Crystal City Read online

  “Wash, rinse, repeat.”

  “Then, this morning I woke up with this clear vision, a conviction, that everything would be okay again if I killed Mark Zuckerberg.”

  “Ha! You’re telling me that of all the stuff you saw behind your father’s big cyber curtain, the thing that has you freaked the most is that he is on Facebook?”

  I had to wait several seconds for him to stop laughing.

  “At least the other stuff is private,” I say.

  “Ah,” he said, wiping a tear away, “you don’t actually know that, though.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Would you calm down, please? You are fine. There’s hardly anybody who hasn’t fantasized about killing the big Z at one time or another. I’d say that’s the last of the fantasies you need to be worrying about.”

  “Argghh,” I said. “And you are my friend, why?”

  “Don’t ask me. It was your idea.”

  “What? How do you figure that?”

  “Remember? You followed me down the railroad tracks that day?”

  “That was you. Following me. Really freaked me out at first too.”

  “Yeah, well they’re my tracks. If you didn’t want to be followed, you shouldn’t have been there.”

  I gave him a shove sideways, causing him to bounce off a chain-link fence guarding a scrubby front yard that didn’t really need guarding. We were just reaching Jasper’s house, down the raggedy, rickety old side street that seemed to have retired from active service along with the railroad line.

  “I wouldn’t even have bothered with you, except that you were the principal’s kid and I thought that might do me some good. Fat chance there. Before, he didn’t even know who I was. Now he stares at me like he caught me humping his garden gnomes.”

  “He doesn’t have any garden gnomes.”

  “No, not anymore. You want to come up for dinner?” he asked, pointing up at the second-floor apartment of the triple-decker as if the height would be the decider.

  “Oh, wow. Thanks,” I said, looking up, then down, then across the street, then back toward home.

  He tapped my shoulder. “I’ll be needing an answer soon. I gotta go take a dump.”

  “No,” I said quickly then. “That’s really nice of you. But, when Dad’s home, I like to have dinner with him. It’s good for us, y’know. To eat together.”

  He shook his head, smilingly, as he crab-walked across his porch toward his bathroom up there on the second floor.

  “You’re a good boy, trying,” he said.

  I shrugged, started walking back my way.

  “He shouldn’t have to eat alone, if I’m around. We’ll get used to each other again.”

  • • •

  I was nearly home when my phone beeped a message. A rarity, it made me stop and dig to retrieve it.

  It was Jasper: “Still on toilet. Thinkin’ funny stuff. Like I be logging out here. Geddit? I just logged out. Made me wonder, did you remember to log out of dad computer? Hope so.”

  Ah, crap.

  DESTINATION HOME

  It is an extremely strange sensation.

  I stayed with the ladies for as long as I possibly could, which meant ten o’clock. They have to be in the hostel by ten thirty or they get locked out, so I guess ten thirty is going to be my curfew too. Suits me just fine because what would I want to do after they were gone anyway? Nothing.

  We sat on the beach, watched people, left the beach. We walked up and down Crystal City’s streets, watched people. We all got hungry at the same time, so I told Molly that if she could take me to the best veal Parmesan sub in town then I was buying. I don’t exactly have money to burn, and still need to budget while figuring out longer-term plans, but real hunger is a powerful influence on a guy. And squiring not just one but two nice ladies around town is an influence no man should want to resist.

  It was a pretty good veal Parm. Molly had meatball, and Stacey had steak and cheese.

  We went back to the beach, full and slow. We sat, we watched people again, and then it was ten.

  When we split up at the junction where the bus station is, it was harder for me to leave than it was to leave each of my family homes. I think it was. It felt like it was.

  Is this the alone-est I have ever been? I am thinking that as I navigate the streets between the station and my place.

  Huh. My place.

  I am thinking it as I take out the brass key on the moose-head ring and twirl it around my finger while I walk along streets already surprisingly familiar to me. In measurable ways, this is surely the most alone I have ever been. I left home. I flew blindly to this strange place. This strange-and-getting-stranger place. I told nobody, because when I reached that moment, the one from the movie scene when the fugitive just has to tell that special somebody or somebodies that he has to go and won’t see them for a while but they will meet up again someday, there was nobody I felt like I could tell.

  And I am thinking yes, this is the maximum of alone because my current two best friends are nipping home for curfew and really I don’t even know those two best friends. But they said they would call me. Except I had to tell them that I am now off the grid. No phone, which I left in Dad’s bathroom so he could hear it ring when he tried to call me and then he would finally take me seriously. No laptop, which is shiny and silver and new, which he bought me out of the black-and-blue because I couldn’t very well be borrowing his, but which sat gleaming and prominent on the breakfast bar when I left.

  These friends of mine could not call me, and so finding them was going to take concentrated effort, but that’s the price of friendship and of disappearing and meaning it. Anybody can run and be found. That’s no trick and it’s no statement. Run, go and stay gone, that’s real.

  It’s decided then, this is true alone, pure and undiluted, as I walk with my key swinging circles around my finger and I turn the last corner onto Syd’s street.

  It took only twenty minutes this time.

  I turn the key in the lock, and of course my uncle Sydney has a well-oiled lock and the tumblers tumble all smooth and satisfying at my command.

  I get inside, where the gleaming clean and comfortable house welcomes me. All mine, all new, all real.

  All alone.

  • • •

  I sleep just as soundly on my second night in my father’s brother’s house as I did on the first. There is nobody trying to wake me in the morning, either, nobody bellowing or kicking my door, nobody comically knocking on my forehead.

  So I wake gradually, listening to the birds outside my open window, hearing cars starting up for the morning commute. The weather outside already feels a little muggy, heavy on my tongue, although there is no sunshine to speak of.

  I could lie here all day. Nobody, anywhere, is expecting anything of me.

  There is a snap, and a thump at the front door and I jackknife up in the bed-sofa.

  Then, there is nothing.

  My heart rate quickens as I sit paralyzed for several seconds, realizing with quick clarity what I am living. I have restarted my life from scratch, new place, nobody knows me, and I know neither the place nor the people.

  And I’ve moved in with my uncle the crime lord.

  Jesus, anything could happen here. Why didn’t it occur to me that anything could happen here? Is this what it’s like being Sydney? Jumping up at every strange sound, never letting your guard down? Is this any way to live?

  I’m listening hard for any kind of follow-up, and I do wish the birds would shut up now. I wish the traffic would start winding down rather than up, but still there is enough quiet in there that I can work out that nothing more seems to be happening around Sydney’s front door.

  If I am going to choose my life for myself, from all possible lives, then I have got to start choosing rather than just letting it happen t
o me. My stomach is still swirling, my arms and legs all twitchy, and nobody has my back. Nobody.

  Is this what it’s like to be Syd?

  Is this any way to live?

  Anything could happen here.

  Hold on.

  Anything could happen here.

  That’s right. It’s all wide open now. Anything could happen.

  That’s what I came for.

  Is this what it’s like to be Syd? Of course not. Spend two minutes with the guy and you know he’s not cowering in bed over things that go bump in the full light of day.

  Is this any way to live? Of course it is, because it’s better than any other way I know, and specifically because anything could happen.

  I throw off my covers, and even though my heart has not stopped racing and I am already a little sweaty, I am not breaking stride, I am not backing up or slowing down, which is not the same as saying I have no fear of this lonesome unknown. It just means that I will go forward into it with my fear to keep me company.

  My hearty stride would actually probably look like a joke to somebody witnessing me now, but I don’t care because if I don’t stride I might stop.

  It’s a package. It’s come through the big, heavily sprung mail slot and fallen on the wood floor below, where it lies before me, in brown paper wrapping.

  Is this what a bomb looks like? I realize I have no idea what a bomb through the mail might look like. Is that the kind of thing that happens in Syd’s world, that people who want to get you get you with things stuffed through your letterbox? Does Syd have enemies and so therefore, do I have actual, honest-to-God enemies before I even have proper friends?

  Enemies? I actually smile for a second. Scary, but a shitload cooler than Kevin Shitbag ever had in Ass Bucket.

  Whatever it is, I can’t leave it on the floor there for three more days or whatever until Syd gets back. Imagine the conversation? “What’s that, Kev? When did it come? Why is it still there? The mail frightened you? Get outta my house.”

  I pick it up carefully, feeling maybe a couple pounds of weight, six by eight by two inches rectangular. I read somewhere how a letter bomb one quarter this size tore the whole second story off an auto body shop.

  I turn it over.

  It’s addressed to me.

  • • •

  Letter bomb, indeed.

  So, Dad knows I’m here. He wouldn’t dare come to Syd’s place, though, I know that. Not unless he’s developed some level of bravery or desperation he never had before.

  I tear the package open as I sit on Syd’s coffee table. There are perfectly comfortable furnishings all around me but before I had even realized what I was doing I had backed away from the front door as if it were booby-trapped, and plunked down with my parcel as soon as I felt the table bump the back of my knees. I am thinking I won’t sit on tables when he’s around, but he’s not, and I pull the book out of the cardboard wrapping.

  For crying out loud. He published it.

  It’s a copy of my father’s poetry book. I knew the poems existed, individually, and he was always talking about the collection. God, the poems. He was always threatening to find a publisher, to get the whole mess assembled and between covers and out there in the world where they could embarrass everybody.

  It embarrassed me every time he brought it up, but he hadn’t done that in a very long time. And anyway, it was always just a joke. He was always laughing when he made that threat. Always laughing then.

  The title of the collection is Mind Monkeys.

  I do not open the thing. I look at the cover, which is glossy banana yellow with no artwork. It just has the title, followed by A Cheeky Chapbook, by A. Chastened Chap. Since the spine and back cover list my name as the publisher, we will assume either a monumentally freakish coincidence or self-publishing.

  It’s actually rather nicely done. He invested.

  I drop it there on the coffee table and walk directly to my room in my home and pull on my clothes quickly. Then I go into my bathroom and brush my teeth. Then I march back, passing the living room, and its coffee table and its coffee-table book, without a look, swinging my key around my finger as I head out my door and into my life.

  I know them all, every syllable, the correct meter, the singsong, the stresses, pauses, inflections. If he thinks he can make me cry remotely now, he is misfiguring Kiki Vandeweghe.

  • • •

  Circling behind the house, I discover a space in the hedge at the back of the small yard. That space opens up onto a scrubby bit of overgrown wildflower land, which I fight through until I emerge onto the Little League diamond.

  It’s empty of kids, this field. I pause for a few seconds and think this is maybe one of those moments when I would get a little thoughtful and misty in light of all my changes and look back on my Little League days fondly or sadly or whatever.

  I never had any Little League days.

  I step across the field, and reach the chain-linked basketball court where one lone skinny gawky guy is shooting lazy baskets with no enthusiasm at all.

  I never played basketball.

  I move on, beyond the court and past the tennis court. I played some tennis. I liked it, way back then, when things were likeable. I might try it again sometime.

  I walk on through a small thicket of pines and onto the path that runs beside the river that turns out to be a canal and takes me where it is I am meant to go.

  Poetry, for shit’s sake. Where does he think he’s going with that?

  • • •

  The girls and I agreed that if I have to be so mysteriously below the radar then I could just try to catch up with them at Crystal Beach right after they are done with church any given morning. It is all casual, and all casual is what I am all about.

  I do not feel casual, as I hotstep it along the canal towpath. The walk is great, cool-ish and quiet with the sluggish water meandering along on my left side and a fair amount of greenery along my right. I’m a little too frothy in the head to slow down and appreciate it just now, but I know that eventually I will. The canal leads down to the beach, and after about a mile and a quarter, I see it opening up before me.

  I am hoping hard the girls are going to show up, and I feel, actually, stunned and stupid about how much I want to see them.

  Yet because this place I’m in is so foreign and new to me, I am something like glad, something like relieved, when I hit the beach and see groupings of folks, characters, who, dodgy though they may be, look familiar to me. The weak wave motion of the water slurps at the shore and I find that inviting. I head for it, scanning for Stacey and Molly as I do. It’s an overcast day, hot again away from the trees, and there aren’t enough people hanging out for them to go unnoticed. They’re not here.

  So I guess for now I’m just like everyone else around here, killing time until they come.

  Crystal Beach could use a cleanup, that’s for sure. It’s not public-health-hazard stuff yet, but it wouldn’t take too many more cigarette packs, junk-food wrappers, or disposable diapers to tip the balance. I walk along it, starting at the canal mouth. It feels like my own personal grand entrance onto the beach as the towpath could pretty much lead me blindfolded straight from Syd’s backyard to here. The path is actually much neater than the beach, looking like somebody is responsible for the upkeep, whacking the invasive greenery back and picking up the litter.

  I did the groundskeeping around our house.

  Nobody does it on Crystal Beach.

  Sprouts of very rugged-looking weeds pop up out of the ground randomly, all the way down to the shoreline. There, some other species climb up out of the bay water, seeming like the gnarly green hands of a bunch of somebodies trapped below and desperately trying to get out. The water itself looks surprisingly clear, though between the unusual odor and sinister sea foliage it would take a braver man than me to swim i
t.

  We had a pool, back home. It was just a small one. I was responsible for that, too. I did a good job.

  I walk the couple hundred yards of navigable frontage until the marshland gives way to much denser, wildly overgrown grasses, weeds, and vines that serve as a natural break between the wasteland of Crystal Beach and the grubby productivity of the wharves just beyond. The small wavelets lap and slurp all the way, keeping me whispery company, which is certainly welcome. One tugboat crosses the harbor right to left, and one ancient trawler—looking like some mutant, clawed sea creature itself—passes the opposite way. The air does not move at all. The sea and sky are joined in that color moment when stainless and blue steel meet.

  Then it ends. I stand like a dope, waiting for instructions. Unsurprisingly, none come.

  I turn and walk back the way I came, over the same gritty sand, past the same wreckage of a big, double baby stroller, through the same wonderful stretch of about thirty yards that is untouched by any clutter or mess at all, no weeds, no garbage, even the sand itself seems to be of a finer grade than the rest and almost groomed. I walk those thirty yards quite slowly.

  Yet, even as I step again onto the tired sand, the sad sand with the blemishes and dog shit, I listen to the slurping sound this beach produces, and it makes me foolishly happier.

  That slurp is Crystal Beach’s voice. It’s a singular thing. I can think it’s speaking to me directly and I can think we understand one another.

  That is a poetry I can get.

  I don’t think the pool and I ever understood one another.

  I am lost in this understanding when a Frisbee thumps me in the chest.

  “Yo, adorable,” yells Mickey, the guy who throated me with the Frisbee the first time. He still has the long frayed cutoffs on, but now he’s also sporting a giant mint-green short-sleeved linen shirt that as I approach I realize smells like he took it off a big fat dead guy. A long-dead fat guy.

  “So, I’m adorable today,” I say, picking the Frisbee up and walking it over to him.