Apathy and Other Small Victories Read online

  Not that she was a big girl or anything. She was about 5'7", medium frame, built like any twenty-five-year-old woman who keeps in shape. But she was fucking solid, and thick, without being broad or outwardly mannish. Her muscles must have been coiled tighter than a normal person’s. Maybe they were more dense. There was something mutant about her. Because I don’t go around getting out-muscled by girls. Not usually anyway. But with her there was nothing I could do. She was the sadistic older brother who holds you down and slaps your forehead over and over again, lets a string of spit fall until it almost hits your face and then slurps it up, over and over again. Only this older brother was fucking me. I’m telling mom.

  I tried faking an orgasm but she either didn’t notice or didn’t care. I tried bucking her off but that only made it hurt worse. My bones were weak from the pounding. My pelvis was shattered. My whole body felt like early onset osteoporosis. I’d have to join a swimming pool therapy class and lift a beach ball over my head with the rest of the old ladies at the Y. Is calcium more potent if you snort it? I was brittle. I was a broken man.

  And then, after it was over, after she was done kicking my naked ass until there was nothing left of it, she had the audacity to curl up on my dislocated shoulder, nestle her head underneath my fractured jaw and sigh and say, “Hold me. Hold me tighter.”

  “I can’t. My arm is broken in three places.”

  “Ahh, that feels so good. To know you’re there. It feels so safe.”

  This as I was openly weeping.

  I lacked the strength to be incredulous, indignant, or even quietly sarcastic. It sounded like some cheap scam straight out of a trashy women’s magazine. Some Please Your Man? Please Yourself! article on how to use basic psychology and transparent strategy to create the illusion of power in your relationship. There was a cute chess metaphor about queen taking king while leaving all the other pieces on the board, and some anecdotal scientific evidence about how men like to hunt and make fire, how women find shoes and lipstick empowering.

  I knew that article. I knew that magazine. And I could tolerate its simple, harmless, vapid philosophy. With enough alcohol I could even participate in it for a few hours at a time. But Gwen was reading a different magazine. One you can only get over the Internet from shadow publishers in former Soviet Republics. One you have delivered to a PO box wrapped in brown paper and sealed in plastic. This article was not called Please Your Man? Please Yourself! It was called He Is Not Boss, He Is Bitch! And it read in rough translation:

  Strip him down. Toss him like rag doll and beat him within inch of life. Beat him until humiliation hurt worse than pain. Maybe set him on fire and laugh. Then be kitten. Tell him he is boss, is brute man, so he will pay for jewelry and fur coats. Pay for trip to America to find old man husband who will die in sleep and leave you rich fortune.

  Magazines make me sad.

  Some nights, as I lay in bed crying softly with my head under my pillow, I could hear the guy in the apartment above me having sex. I could hear him fucking his guinea pig. The squeals were unmerciful.

  He used to take it out for walks on a leash, a long thin chain that was attached to the back of the patent leather corset the guinea pig was always wearing, bulging out of either side like a squashed sausage. It had a cute little leather slave hood strapped over its head so all you could see were its spastically twitching nose and panicked eyes as it scurried frantically all over the sidewalk, straining against the chain, trying desperately to escape. But it could not.

  “Hey conchumbo!” its master said, walking towards me as I stood outside the building gasping in horror. I’d heard the squeals a few nights before and convinced myself that it was just the TV, or a warped recording of The Chipmunks Sing Christmas. It was the only way I could go on living. But really it was worse than I had imagined.

  “You’re new to the building right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, staring first at the guinea pig, then at him. He was at least 6'5" and about 97 lbs, so pale he could’ve been albino. He had no eyebrows. He was wearing a long leather trench coat that billowed behind him as he walked and a T-shirt with a punk band on the front that I’d never heard of because they weren’t the Sex Pistols.

  “What apartment you in?” he said in a strange, forced accent, like he’d seen Scarface way too many times.

  “302.”

  His leather pants were tight on his spindly legs. There were zippers everywhere.

  “That’s right below me mambala! Sorry if I kept you up the other night, heh heh,” and he smiled and yanked the leash as the guinea pig tried to dart out into the busy street to die.

  “I’m Mobo.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My name is Mobo.”

  “Is that Swedish?”

  “No,” he said, and looked away. In a far off voice, he continued. “It was given to me by a Honduranian shaman, a man of great power and wisdom.” He had a long goatee shaved out away from his face into a nappy stalk that he stroked lightly with his whole hand as he talked. He looked like the pharaoh of a ruined perverted civilization.

  “You lived in Honduras?” I said.

  “No. The shaman did. I met him one night in an airport in Dallas. I had a layover.”

  “I see.”

  “And this bitch here,” he yanked on the leash again, “is Ivan.”

  Ivan darted all over the sidewalk, so close to freedom yet so terribly far away.

  “That outfit’s . . . something.”

  “It’s waterproof,” he said.

  “Yikes.”

  Mobo looked me up and down, still stroking his goatee.

  “Listen moncheechee, I know we just met, but I can tell things about people. I have this perception.” He cocked his head and listened to the clouds singing as they passed before the sun, but he couldn’t hear them because they were too far away. “I can tell you’re a man who knows how the game is played.”

  “Oh jesus.”

  “What do you say you come up to my apartment and we have a business convo, macho de pucho.”

  “Uh, I can’t. I have to go see my girlfriend. Her name is Gwendolyn.” And in that moment, I loved her dearly.

  “Ha ha, I know how it is my man. Las minas. Minatas! Ha ha ha.” And he laughed at the joke I didn’t know he’d made. “That’s good. That’s good. Stay busy. Keeps you sane. But if you ever need a little something, a little powder, a few pills, you come up to my place. Anytime. You want to get happy, get fucked up, get focused, I’ll show you what they really put in those piñatas!”

  “Uh, what?”

  “I sell fireworks too. M-80s, Roman candles, top of the line army issue shit. You get the downstairs neighbor discount.”

  “That’s fantastic.”

  “There’s a lot you can do in this town, a lot that can happen armurro. You just need to know the right people. Come up anytime. Unless you hear me taking care of some other business. Then you’ve got to wait your turn.”

  And something inside of me died.

  Mobo jerked the leash and dragged little Ivan towards the front door.

  “Till we meet again mamado,” he said, and the door closed behind them.

  And they went up to his apartment, the guinea pig stiffening his tiny legs but unable to put up any real resistance. Mobo whispered several Spanish-sounding gibberish words as he dragged the terrified animal into the boudoir. Then he kissed Ivan harshly on his little mouth, and turned off the lights. And many, many laws of God and man were broken in the darkness.

  * * *

  “Ahhh, that was so good.”

  It was after sex again and my head was broken. I was definitely bleeding internally. I think my brain was injured. I was having trouble doing simple multiplication. That’s the test I use to gauge head trauma whenever I’m really drunk or I fall down. I’d never had to do it after sex though. I thought 4 × 3 was 8, and 7 × 5 was 200. Fuck.

  Gwen and I had been butting heads like rams. She’d lean over and bang! smack m
e right in the forehead, then rear back and do it again. She seemed to like it, but I was real dizzy. I was one of those rams that had no horns, a baby ram or a girl ram, so it was just my soft head getting bashed in. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing on that mountain anyway.

  “Ow,” I said, lightly running my fingers over my forehead, looking for the crack in my skull. You would think that after so many sex beatings I’d have been numb to the pain, that I was all scar tissue and fused bone and dead inside, but she always found a way to make it hurt like new.

  She took a breath like she was about to say something, but then she didn’t and I was glad. Then she did anyway.

  “At first, I thought you were just using me,” she said.

  “I definitely am.” I just wasn’t sure for what.

  “Asshole!” she said, and punched me in the side. And she laughed as my kidney began to hemorrhage.

  That’s the beauty of honesty. Everyone’s so unused to hearing it they just assume you’re kidding, and you get to feel very good and forthcoming without suffering any consequences except for traces of blood in your urine for the next day or two.

  “No,” she said, “I was afraid you were just using me to get a position,” and she waited for me to catch on and chime in with something clever so we could be just like a witty couple on a sitcom. But I was too preoccupied with my internal injuries to play Smothers Brothers. I didn’t need laughs. I needed a doctor.

  “A job I mean,” and she grinned, pleased with herself. “But you’re not, are you.”

  “Ugh,” I said, and I flinched as she moved towards me, bracing myself for more punishing sex. But she draped her arm over my chest instead.

  “Even if you were, I’d help you,” she whispered as I slipped into a coma.

  “So?” she said, some time later.

  “Huh?”

  “Do you want me to talk to anybody for you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Haven’t you been listening? At Panopticon. Do you want me to talk to anybody about you maybe getting a job.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’d have to start out on the ground floor, maybe even as a temp. But you’d move up quickly. I know you would.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a lot of opportunity,” she said, and raised herself up on one elbow. “So do you want me to talk to anyone for you?”

  “At your insurance company?” She actually seemed serious. “No thanks, I’m all right.”

  She looked at me for a long time. Not long enough for me to turn my head and look at her, but still pretty long.

  “You’re so, independent,” she said.

  It was nice of her to want to believe the best about me. People tend to do that with the strangers they’re fucking. If she wanted to think that apathy and independence were the same thing, good for her. Maybe she was right.

  And it was nice of her to want to help me out with a job, whatever her real motivations were. Apart from beating the shit out of me during sex she seemed like a nice person. But nice just isn’t enough anymore. Everybody’s nice, or they at least try to be, or pretend to be. You have to go to France or New York City to find a real asshole these days, and they’re only doing it because people expect them to, like those monkeys at the zoo who throw their shit at visitors through the bars. It’s more reputation than a real desire to smear feces all over somebody. And that’s just sad.

  “What are you thinking?” Gwen said.

  I pretended to be asleep.

  Marlene had been teaching me sign language during those hours when Doug was on the couch in his office, sipping iced tea and sobbing into his hands. She said I was getting pretty good. I knew the whole alphabet and a couple of words, but I mostly said fuck, shit, dick head, asshole and sex. It was just like first grade.

  And just like in first grade, shit was my favorite. To make the sign you stick out your thumb and then close your other hand around it, then pull your thumb down out of your fist. It’s disturbingly graphic. You can almost hear the plop. Marlene said I should be a translator, like at the United Nations, but there’s no country where everybody’s deaf so I don’t know who I could represent. And even if there was a deaf country I doubt me telling the Lebanese ambassador to go fuck himself in sign language would go over too well, geopolitically speaking.

  Doug was amazed.

  “I can stand here and ask her the same question five times and she has no idea what I’m talking about, but you just move your hands around and she knows exactly what you mean!”

  Doug never really understood the concept of sign language. And most of the time I wasn’t even signing. I was mashing my hands together and flittering my fingers while clearly mouthing the same question to her that Doug had just asked five times. When he talked he mumbled or played with his mustache or turned his head in mid-sentence. Then he’d say the same thing again, only louder. Doug never understood that for someone to read your lips they need to see your mouth, and that volume doesn’t matter when you’re deaf. Doug never understood a lot of things.

  “I can’t believe how quick you picked it up. Did you speak any sign language before you started coming here?”

  “No, I did not,” I said, while signing I hate you.

  Marlene barked a laugh, then pressed her lips together as her face went red.

  “That’s great,” Doug said, smiling. “Say something else.”

  “I speak sign language, but I am not deaf,” I said, and signed I want to throw my shit at you.

  Marlene was trying to strangle the laugh in her throat. She sounded like a gagged hostage whimpering for her life.

  “How do you say ‘I am a dentist’?” he asked.

  I eat my shit, I signed, as Doug haltingly imitated me. Marlene couldn’t hold it together. “HMAAA! . . . HMAAA! . . . HMAAA!” she blared in a series of atonal bursts that rose into strange registers and pitches, then went silent before blaring again, like a malfunctioning boat horn signaling to the shore. She hid her face in her hands.

  “Why is she laughing?” Doug asked.

  “I’ll ask her.”

  Why do you have sex with my shit? I signed.

  Stop it! Asshole! I’m going to get fired!

  “She says when we speak sign language it’s like we have lisps, and we use broken phrases, like immigrants. She says we talk like lisping immigrants.”

  “Ha ha, well, we’re in the right country for it!” Doug said.

  I don’t think he even knew what he was talking about.

  I eat my shit, Doug signed slowly to her, grinning.

  And tears rolled down Marlene’s deaf cheeks.

  If I could’ve said for sure where I’d been the night before I would have felt a lot better about sitting in the interrogation room of a police station, but even so I didn’t feel that bad. The bright light made the room a little warmer than it should have been, and I was still pretty hung over, but I was getting used to it. I had nothing to worry about. I was probably down at the bar, drinking pitchers of beer and not talking to anyone. I probably was. Everything would be fine.

  Detective Sikes walked in holding a manila file folder, his chest puffed out like a little bird. He sat down in the middle chair and laid the folder on the table between us. Brooks was probably at the tinted window with The Chief saying, “Let’s see how the kid does.”

  “Before we get started detective, can I ask you a question?” I said.

  “All right.” He was immediately thrown off.

  “Why did the other detective call you ‘Sergeant’ at my apartment? I thought detectives and sergeants were different?”

  “They are different. Sergeant is my first name,” he said.

  “Wow. What a crazy coincidence.”

  “Not really. My dad was a detective. Two of my uncles were cops. My grandfather was chief of police back in the fifties.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. I know,” he said, temporarily human and forlorn.

  “Detective Sikes, can yo
u come out here for a second?” It was Brooks, talking over a speaker that sounded like it was right above my head. He was pissed.

  I tried to keep a straight face as I imagined the shouting that was going on outside. When Sikes came back in his face was flushed and he was all business.

  “All right, let’s start over. How well did you know Marlene Burton?”

  “I knew her all right. I was at the dentist’s a lot. Doug has some kind of banged up narcolepsy from getting his head smashed by a bus door, so while he freaked out in his office me and Marlene used to talk. She taught me sign language.”

  He looked at me the way my mom did the time she caught me officiating the wedding of Mr. Potato Head and He-Man. I had just said, “You may kiss the bride,” and when I looked up she was standing in the doorway. I was fourteen years old, and I was not wearing any pants.

  “We’re in a police station here tough guy. I don’t know if you realize how serious this is. A woman is dead.” I got the feeling he was trying hard not to have a nervous breakdown, just like my mom did.

  “I am being serious,” I said.

  “When was the last time you saw Marlene Burton?”

  “About a month ago, maybe longer. At the office during my last appointment, whenever that was.”

  “Anything happen between the two of you? She seem like she was okay?”

  “Nothing happened. She seemed fine to me.”

  “You ever been to her house?”

  “Nope. Wait once. For a party. She put a sign on my back. It was humiliating.”

  He looked at me like I had no pants on again. It wasn’t my fault. He-Man and Mr. Potato Head were in love.

  “Did you have a sexual relationship with Marlene Burton?”

  “No way.”

  “What, you don’t like girls?”