B008J4PNHE EBOK Page 11

  “This is terrific, Mina,” said Sam. “Can I keep these?”

  “Okay. Whatever. I’m going to rest my eyes for a second.” She put her head on the table. She smiled at him. Her blue eyes fluttered shut inside the holes of her Zorro mask.

  Sam slid the folder over to Tom. His sister’s breathing regulated as she fell into an abrupt sleep. He studied her—lips parted, cheeks flushed, mask slid crooked up her sweet, pale temple—and the floor behind her seemed to gape. Sam envisioned the chair tipping back, her rag-doll body tumbling into darkness, into drugs and madness and the hands of evil men. It was melodrama, he knew, but Mina was the only kid sister he had.

  There was also the distinct possibility that Sandra was an even worse parent than Booth. North of forty now, her ambitions for a career in the arts long since lapsed, she was still walking dogs for a living, and her never especially sparkling attitude had become so assiduously bleak that a person who didn’t know her would probably assume that she was making a weird woe-is-me stab at humor. Sandra’s days of wrecking other people’s marriages were past. Now it was her time to roost, gargoylelike, paranoid and snappy, on the rubble of her union with Booth. Sam might have liked to take some petty satisfaction from his stepmother’s downturn, except that she was also his sister’s mother.

  The last time Sam had spoken to her—he’d called to talk with his sister—Sandra had gleefully informed him that she had a growth on her forearm, and she figured that with her luck, it was pretty much a slam dunk it was cancer. “So tell Booth to get his party hat ready! I’m sure he’ll want to throw a big shindig and give everyone free money once the witch is dead.”

  Among Sandra’s craziest notions was that Sam’s father was secretly rich. If this were true, it was a secret to Booth as well. Sam hadn’t seen the man in an unstained pair of trousers since the mid-nineties. “What the hell, Sandra. What if Mina’s listening on the other phone?”

  Sandra puffed on whatever it was she was smoking, then smacked something—a fly, or perhaps some cheerful thought that had made the mistake of becoming corporeal in her presence—with what sounded like a magazine. “She’s gotta learn sometime.”

  “Huh.” Tom straightened the photos into a neat pile. Family curst, said the one on top. “I’m not sure it’s any big deal. Kids like to press buttons.”

  “You really think that’s all?”

  “Yeah. Probably. But, if you’re really worried, maybe you should talk to your pop.”

  “My pop.”

  Tom ignored his godson’s tone and continued on cheerfully. “Old Booth’s going to get a kick out of the guy in the john. When are you going to show it to him?”

  The younger man made an openhanded gesture—someday.

  “You still on the outs with Booth?”

  “The way you say it makes it sound like I’m mad because he didn’t say hi to me when we walked by each other at the mall.”

  “I don’t mean for it to sound any way, buddy. I’m just asking.”

  “Look. Booth was never around. He never kept his promises, and he screwed off with anything that moved, and his career is—it’s just the worst joke, you know. And he married Sandra, who you know very well is fucked up, and where’s that supposed to leave Mina, Tom?”

  Tom smiled; his godfather’s front teeth were the color of weathered teak. “Your mom forgave him, buddy. Old Booth’s the only dad you’ve got. He’s not perfect, but he’s got his merits.”

  In her sleep, Mina hiccupped.

  “You know, Allie would have loved that movie. Loved it. You know that, don’t you? Your mom was tough, but she’d have cried her eyes out.”

  Sam had no response to that. He’d never been able to predict his mother’s reactions to films—and that was as far as he was willing to let his thoughts go on the subject.

  For a few minutes, they didn’t talk. Tom ate. Sam sipped his drink. The girls outside were hanging condoms on the tree. The wrinkled latex glistened in the sun. One of the girls rushed at the other and tried to wipe her spermicide-coated fingers on her friend’s face. They laughed and grappled.

  His godfather wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “You need some cash for all this?”

  Sam told him not to worry. He would put their lunch on Brooks’s meal card. Too many drugs or not enough, Sam couldn’t say, but lately, the AD never seemed to stop moving. He jittered from place to place, picking things up, putting them down, opening drawers, closing drawers, all the while enveloped in a reeking sulfurous bubble, the result of who knew how many struck match tips. Maybe it was the toll of all the hours he spent bowed over the editing machine, slashing at film. But Brooks had told Sam that he might as well have the meal card; he was too busy to eat, the AD said, and anyway, it ruined his appetite, the cameras watching him chew.

  ■ ■ ■

  When Tom deposited Mina in the backseat of the taxi to take them to the train station, she woke up and stared at Sam from behind the eyeholes of her mask. “I’ll call you,” he said. “In the meantime, try not to fixate so much on death and tragedy. You’re a kid, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  His sister yawned. “I had a dream about you.”

  “Yeah?” He picked a lock of sweaty blond hair from her forehead, tucked it behind her ear.

  “You put a dynamite stick in your ear, and all of your hair caught on fire.” To help him visualize this, Mina wiggled her fingers over the surface of her scalp. “But you were, like, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay! Everyone relax, I’m okay.’ I could tell you were just lying to make us feel better.”

  “Dreams are funny,” said Sam. “Hey, don’t ever put dynamite in your ear.”

  The cabdriver cleared his throat.

  Mina didn’t pay him any mind. “Oh! Oh! Dad’s going to take me to Paris. We’re going to raise hell. You should come with us, Sam.”

  “Maybe I will,” he said, and felt sad, and thought, That son of a bitch.

  Her look was disappointed. “I bet you won’t.”

  Sam gave the roof of the car a slap. “I love you.” He kissed his sister and stepped back. “Safe trip.” He nodded to his godfather. “Tom.”

  As the car pulled away, Tom leaned over Mina to yell, “It was a damn decent movie, buddy! Makes you think, you know?”

  The taxi turned onto the college’s main drive and continued out the gate.

  “My first review,” said Sam.

  ■ ■ ■

  The cafeteria had closed—it was late in the afternoon, past four—and Sam had to bang on the door until a line cook appeared to let him inside.

  Brooks’s meal card was on the table where he’d forgotten it. Sam pocketed the card. Out the window he saw the two girls seated on the grass beneath the tree. The paper cranes twisted lightly on their strings, and the plastic wrap of the cigarette packs shimmered. The condoms hung like dead withered things but glowed from within, a hearth orange. It was a magic tree. Sam wished he had a camera; he’d have liked to capture it on film.

  A couple of raps on the glass caught the girls’ attention.

  One was a pudgy brunette with her temples sheared to the skin, and the other was a tall redhead with bangs in her eyes. They both wore the expressions of the deeply baked, blissful and staggered. They grinned at Sam from the opposite side of the Plexiglas. I like your tree, he mouthed.

  The brunette threw her arms around her friend and giggled into the redhead’s neck. Meanwhile, the redhead pursed her lips and placed a greasy finger to the window glass to draw a simple question in spermicide: WHY?

  He held up his finger, Wait, and went outside to explain.

  11.

  In truth, it wasn’t that much fun. For normal people—that is, for the vast majority who are not possessed with balletic flexibility—sex works better and makes far more sense in even numbers. Odd-numbered sex is a math problem. Everyone is calculating where to be, measuring distances, dividing resources, and inevitably, ending up with fractions. The effort to keep all the parties involved is lik
ely to go well beyond pleasant frustration to end in discomfort and/or confusion. At some stage in the evening’s exercises, for example, Sam bit a thigh only to realize that he was actually biting his own arm, gone numb beneath the weight of one of the girls.

  It was, however, the last night when he felt about himself how he always had—like a person on the way—and because of that, he regarded it more wistfully than he would have otherwise. Afterward, Sam was who he would always be, complete, finished, wrapped.

  ■ ■ ■

  Roughly eight years later, his best friend, Wesley Latsch, proposed a theory: the threesome had exhausted Sam’s personal reservoir of good luck. “Why do you think that people win the lottery and then their lives fall apart?” asked his best friend.

  Wesley shook his head, not at Sam but at the scrolling computer screen on the desk in front of him. Following a few aimless years in the advertising industry, Wesley had found a niche as a professional blogger. The genesis of his career realignment had been the penning of a list entitled “Seventy-Four Things That Cause Unnecessary Fatigue.” The list—which included everything from #7, “Dating,” followed by #8, “Laundry that must be air-dried,” to “Jazz” at #28, and “Criticizing people face-to-face and being criticized face-to-face” at #30, to #53, “Waiting in lines,” and #73, “British-style crosswords”—had led Wesley to appreciate that if he were ever to find happiness, it would be in a job that, at the very least, allowed him to work from home, at hours of his own choosing, and liberated from the hygienic regulations of the office world.

  “Everything goes wrong because they have no luck reserves. The lottery uses it all up. Then they have no luck to fall back on, and all the negative forces in the world zap them.”

  “You make luck sound like sunscreen,” said Sam.

  “You had sex with two attractive women to whom you owed no attachment. For free. You ran your luck reserves down to nothing.”

  They were roommates then, on a Thursday in the fall of 2011, and shared an incommodious fourth-floor walk-up in Red Hook. The living room window held a view of a solvent-colored notch of the Gowanus Canal. Sam sat on the couch, surrounded by boxes of shit that people sent to Wesley.

  Once he had concluded what he could no longer brook—i.e., unnecessary fatigue—Wesley determined that what he was ideally suited for was “cultural criticism.” Besides his exacting nature, his term of service in the warrens of advertising had gained him a lifetime’s worth of experience with unsatisfactory products. Thus was born his blog, The Swag Hag Chronicles. The Hag offered his thoughts on movies, music, books, electronics, toys, doodads, tools, household items, fair-trade coffee beans, hot sauce, whatever, so long as it was free. In this capacity, it was only under the most extraordinary circumstances that Wesley was forced to expose himself to the enervations of his list.

  His legions of readers regarded the Swag Hag as a kind of one-man no-bullshit consumer-advocacy strike force. He offered only two grades: NOT EVEN FOR FREE, and YEAH, I’LL TAKE IT. About the latest Madonna album, Wesley had decreed, Listening to this album made me feel like I was trapped inside a Tetris game while strangers slapped my fat rolls. NOT EVEN FOR FREE. More favorably, about the Gourmet Artisan three-speed food processor, he wrote, The average human heart weighs ten ounces. On high speed this processor turned ten ounces of raw chicken into a frappé in thirty seconds. Therefore, this processor can render your archenemy’s heart drinkable in under thirty seconds. YEAH, I’LL TAKE IT.

  “What about people in, you know, the poorest, most war-torn countries? Places where there’s guerrilla fighting and no clean water and asshole corporations are sucking up all the oil and precious metals?” Sam tore open a box from a company that made joke items. “Why are the people in those places so unlucky?”

  To this, Wesley responded with a murmur of consideration. On his computer screen, there was a looping video of a German shepherd on its hind legs, punching a man in the face. Over and over, the dog’s forepaw shot out, and the man stumbled backward, his comb-over flipped up into a tragic Mohawk.

  Here was the nut of modern life, of Sam’s life. Embarrassment was entertainment; people devoured humiliation like fucking bonbons. Every stupid thing you ever did was forever. Because of the camera on the bureau, the guy you most regretted fucking fucked you for all eternity. Because it was on film, your slip, your car crash, your drunken confession never ended; you kept slipping, crashing, slurring, continuously. When did it become such a crime, Sam wondered, to be careless? He felt very sorry for the dog, and sorrier for the man with the comb-over, and sorriest for himself.

  In the box from the joke company, there was a selection of fake noses: bulbous noses, needle noses, flat noses, and crooked noses of various sizes and colors. They had nothing on Orson Welles’s fabulous nose at the Museum of Cinema Arts, but they would be fine for a kid’s Halloween getup. As he turned the shapes over in his hands, the rubber tacky against his skin, Sam was, naturally, reminded of his father.

  The year his parents began their divorce proceedings, when Sam was eleven, Allie marked on a school form that his parents were separated. The elementary school guidance counselor, Mr. Alford, had called Sam in for a session.

  “Tough times at home, huh? I’m awfully sorry to hear that. Not uncommon, though. Well, do you think you’ll live?” the counselor asked Sam. Mr. Alford was widely considered to be a dork. On Halloween, for instance, he was one of the teachers who really went for it in the costume department. That year he had been the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Sam, hunched on a couch against the wall, noticed bits of shed straw mashed into the gray rug of the guidance office floor.

  “I’ll be okay,” said Sam, and Mr. Alford said, “All right!” and suggested they play checkers for the rest of the period.

  For a few minutes they pushed around the pieces. Alford asked if he could ask a question. Sam shrugged.

  “Okay: your dad. I’ve seen a bunch of his movies at the drive-in—over in Hyde Park, you know? And he always looks so different from movie to movie. What do you think his big secret is?”

  “False noses.” Sam hopped a couple of the guidance counselor’s red pieces. “He has these two big cases of false noses.”

  “No way!” Mr. Alford slapped his knee. “That’s all? Prosthetic noses? Really? It’s like his whole face changes!” He shook his head, grinning.

  “Your turn,” Sam said, and Mr. Alford said, “Oh! Right! Sorry!”

  The descendant of that boy carefully replaced the lid on the box of noses. Sam twisted around to where a much bigger box sat on the floor, opened its flaps, and dropped the nose box inside. Then he gave the bigger box a shove with his foot. It fell over with a thump and vomited a gush of packing poppers.

  On the computer screen, the German shepherd continued to strike. Wesley tapped his computer’s space bar. “You’ve stumped me with this poor-places issue, Sam. I don’t know why some countries and peoples are so unlucky. It could be I’m completely wrong. Maybe there’s no such thing as luck at all. Maybe fucking and winning the lottery are just things that happen. I hope it goes without saying, I would much rather I’m wrong. I don’t want to believe that your epic bone session with those two stoned girls created some karmic liability. Who would want to believe that?”

  It was late afternoon. The low sun deepened the color of their sliver of the canal from glassy pink to impenetrable vermilion. A slab of Styrofoam sailed by on the current. Two small flags, U.S. and Puerto Rican, poked up from the Styrofoam. It was a brave and fragile picture, Sam thought.

  “But let’s not get too lost in these philosophical questions,” Wesley went on. “Let’s keep our eye on what’s important: two girls at once. Whatever else, that goes in the win column.”

  12.

  The next morning Sam did, without a doubt, as he extracted himself from the arms and legs of the two women, and the large mound of quilts that had served as their makeshift bed, feel like a terrific success. (The two actual beds in the room, both sin
gles, were too small to accommodate the group. There it was again: the issue of engineering. “This is like an operation!” the redhead had complained sometime in the middle of the episode. “A love operation,” the brunette had added in a sultry bass, and that cracked them up so much, a break was required to smoke more pot. Thoroughly stoned, Sam was emboldened to confess that he was feeling a tad inadequate. “You are inadequate,” the brunette had said, “but that’s what girls are into.”)

  While the sex itself hadn’t been all that pleasurable, he found himself viewing it in experiential terms: just as he was sure that, with this first movie under his belt, his next would be even better, it seemed likely that, with practice, his group-sex skills could only improve. Wait, he had made a movie, hadn’t he?

  A new sensation of boundless possibility made every detail of that morning stand in relief. It felt as if he were home for the first time in a long time; it felt really, really good.

  Dressed only in his boxer shorts, Sam carried the rest of his clothes in a bundle down the hall to the coed bathroom. When he urinated, he noticed that one of the girls had lightly written CUTE! in tiny letters in green ink on the head of his penis. Sam sighed happily at the sight. The letters were so ornate and feminine, furling at the tips. He had an urge to photograph it, except he didn’t want any pictures of his penis floating around in the world. In the shower, the word faded to faint shadow.

  The day’s plan was: pack his gear, drive to Queens for a late-afternoon screening with Wassel and Patch. The producers had been making eager noises. “Two words,” Wassel had told him when they spoke on the phone. “Rick, and Savini.” Patch, who had also been on the line, chimed in, “No, no. Just one beautiful word, sluts: Ricksavini.”

  Sam put on the rest of his clothes, left the dorm, and started to walk across campus in the direction of the film department.

  The magic tree, the yellow willow decorated in cranes and condoms, was a few steps from the dorm. Shrunken by their exposure to the air, the condoms had the appearance of discarded husks. Ah, he mused, how sorrowful is the short prime of the prophylactic bloom!