“HUMAN VOICES WAKE US and we drown!” the parrot ominously squawked from the other room, tucked away under the stairs.
Faisal froze and tensed his shoulders up. “What the fresh fucking hell was that?””
“There’s a bird that’s been quoting T.S. Eliot since I came in earlier,” I said. I figured that if I talked slow and enunciated every word they wouldn’t know I was drunk. If they were as drunk as I was, they weren’t showing it, and it felt wrong to be disproportionately more fucked up than my friends.
I caught myself smiling a stupid, half-in-the-bag grin because they were my friends and because there was a big cartoony bird quoting modernist poetry.
“This is a nightmare,” Faisal said, leaning past us to see the bird. “I hate those things.”
“Parrots?” I said.
“Even when they quote poetry like little Shakespeares?” Michael said.
“Yes, even then.”
“What if it was quoting Total Recall?” he asked.
“You know how I feel about parrots,” he said.
“But I also know how you feel about Total Recall,” Michael said with exceptionally convincing eyebrows.
“Faisal’s afraid of birds,” Matty said to me.
I put on a very serious listening face.
“I am not afraid of birds; I just don’t trust animals who have any kind of handle on human language.”
“But it’s just mimicry,” I said. “Except for the ones that learn how to count and have a vocabulary of almost two thousand words. Those birds are…” I trailed off when I realized how heavy my arms felt and how if I turned my head back and forth it felt like there was a delay in my vision.
“What is it what is it what is it!” the parrot said to the coats. “Etherized!”
Faisal grimaced and made a “yick” noise. “Just … where’s the basement?”
Across the room, an Imperial stormtrooper was whispering something to a girl dressed like a sexy tree. They were sitting on one of the ratty couches talking and he kept trying to flirt with her by taking her hand and resting it way up on his inner thigh. She’d pull her hand away, he’d lean in and say something to her, and he’d try to drag her hand back. Right as it looked like she was going to get up and leave, he braced his hands out, said something we couldn’t hear, and pulled an Altoids tin out of his pocket.
Drunk Moses couldn’t focus as concisely as he would have liked, but the still-pounding bass underfoot faded to background noise as the asshole on the couch kept trying to flirt with Tree Girl.
The sexy tree girl looked at it, looked at him, and eventually nodded with a tight-lipped, “quit being a douchebag” smile.
“There is absolutely no reason why you and that bird aren’t best friends,” Matty was saying to Faisal, leaning into the small room to get a better look at the parrot.
“I can think of every single reason in the world as to why me and that bird aren’t even casual acquaintances,” Faisal said with disgusted, fascinated horror.
Sexy Tree Girl’s face read like she was about to punch the stormtrooper to death. He held up his hands, holding onto the tin and pacifying the situation before pulling a blue pill out of the Altoids container. He balanced it on two outstretched fingers and, just as she reached out to take it, pulled his hand back. He pinched it between his gloved fingers, motioning like he was about to throw a dart and aiming at her mouth.
“What if it was quoting Tremors?” Michael said.
“The bird doesn’t get less awful the better it quotes movies, it gets worse.”
The stormtrooper tossed the small blue shape and it ricocheted off her ear, bouncing toward us. His laugh came out muffled from under his mask. She stood up, almost fell back, and then made her way past us.
“Fucking asshole,” she said as she made her way through the door. As she stumbled past us, I realized she was drunker than me. The stormtrooper bounded over to the door, still laughing, and he didn’t seem very drunk at all. Drunk Moses felt his back get sweaty and his blood pressure start to climb. Drunk Moses started thinking about which classic rock song was appropriate for tackling drug-dealing sex predators.
“Wait! Come back— Ah, fuck it,” he said.
I picked the small blue tablet up off the ground. It was about the diameter of a pencil eraser and there was an anchor carved into its middle.
“Matty?” the stormtrooper said through Faisal and Michael to her back.
Matty clenched her eyes shut at the muffled voice behind her and puffed a short, sharp breath through her nose. Michael and Faisal leaned back out of the parrot-room and looked over her shoulder at the stormtrooper.
“Matty,” Faisal whispered. “It’s a stormtrooper.”
“Maybe I’m not the Matty he’s looking for.”
“Matty Gable?” There was no mistaking the excited familiarity in his voice.
“No, I think he definitely knows you,” Faisal whispered.
She let out a slow breath and her face went pleasant as she turned around. When the stormtrooper saw her massive belly he jolted to a stop and pointed at her stomach.
“Jesus Christ.”
I decided it was a good idea to loudly ask, “Who is this goddamn stormtrooper? Stormtrooper! Who are you?” He still hadn’t noticed the tablet in my hand.
The stormtrooper lifted his helmet halfway off and rested it on the crown of his head; he was smiling a huge, open, and completely dead smile. Faisal’s face went slack and Matty tried to keep looking pleasant.
“The goddamn stormtrooper is Dalton Emmory,” Faisal said to me. The familiarity in his voice lacked any excitement and I decided that the most casual thing to do was to make unwavering eye contact with the drug-peddling, galactic douchebag.
“Oh. Shit,” Michael said, not exactly laughing, not exactly not. “Hi, Dalton. How you been, man?”
“You’re pregnant? That’s fucking crazy,” Dalton the stormtrooper said.
“Dalton,” Michael said. “Relax, it’s—”
“Fuck off, Mike,” he said as though Michael was a little kid interrupting the adult. “You’re pregnant? Is it mine?” he said, pointing at Matty. Her complexion had gone off-white. He looked back and forth between the four of us. “I’m kidding. Matty, Mike, guys, I’m kidding. Just, wow though,” Dalton said. There was nothing in his voice that said he was actually kidding. What his voice actually said was that he was the kind of person who added “I’m kidding!” to very serious statements.
“Come on, guys. We have to get back anyway,” Michael said with a more level voice than I would have expected.
Matty took a small breath, smiled, and diplomatically said, “It was good seeing you, Dalton.” She took Michael’s hand and started for the door.
“No, you know what: no. Sorry,” he said, his tone going cold and loud. “This is fucking stupid and we have to talk about it. What is your goddamn problem? I just want to talk. We don’t talk anymore,” Dalton said, fluctuating back to a calmer, more reasonable tone.
“Hey,” Michael said, stepping between them. “That’s enough, Dalton.”
Dalton wetted his lips and almost looked like he was going to apologize. To just let it go. Instead, he took a sip of his drink and said, “I cared about you, Matty.”
“Are you really doing this right now?” Faisal asked semi-rhetorically.
“How much did you care? Would you have shot someone for her?” I said, enunciating everything. I figured it was a perfect time for a stormtrooper accuracy joke.
“What? Who the fuck are you?”
“Dalton,” Matty said. “We’ll talk about this some oth—”
“No, we won’t. Because we don’t talk anymore.” He took a heavy breath in through his nose and sloshed his drink around in his cup. “And you’re fucking pregnant?”
The stormtrooper joke I had lined up died halfway up my pipes; the sulking idiot in front of us was another one of Matty’s defining moments. I’d been stupid enough to think that her mother had been her only one.
And even though I was drunk, I could see him fitting into her past. How he was a hurdle that she’d never asked for, and how we all get more than one defining moment.
Dalton was my bullet when I was eight, or Charlie’s last year.
He was all the things that a little girl named Allison walked into that made her name Lump.
He was Test’s desire to be command authority with a stupid new title like Coach.
Next to me, Michael was unambiguously not laughing. He kept half shaking his head each time the stormtrooper said something.
“Matty, come on, let’s go,” Faisal said.
“Shut up, Faisal,” Dalton said. “This is a conversation we need to have.”
Matty patted Faisal on the arm and gave him a shushing, calming look. “Dalton, this isn’t a conversation I want to have right now.”
“We dated for a year.” His pupils were tiny black points.
“I remember.” Her voice was iron.
“Do you remember how hard it was getting you to come out of your sexless little shell?”
Even as he said it, she didn’t flinch. Her face didn’t change at all.
The parrot behind us said, “No great matter! Great matter!”
As much as I wanted to go screaming toward the idiot, I knew that there was nothing I could add to the situation that Matty hadn’t already brought. As much as we all wanted to jump in, she had it under control—everything Dalton said to her bounced off.
And still, the more that bird quoted Eliot, the more I wanted to scream.
“That’s enough,” Michael said.
“You barely held a boy’s hand before me—I loved you and now you’re knocked up?” The gears, somewhere in his stormtrooper head, turned. “The whole time: the whole time you were shooting off whore flares, but I didn’t care.”
“Then he said whore flares,” Faisal said to nobody, shaking his head.
When she didn’t fall apart or start crying, Dalton said, “Good one, Faisal.” His responses were getting desperate. Matty wasn’t folding. “I loved you, Matty—it took you almost six months to start loving me back, but you did. And then you broke my heart. And now you’re doing it again.” He flinched when he said it, like he knew he was barreling steadfast over a line he couldn’t uncross. Instead of shutting up and walking away, he said, “No, it’s bullshit: Little Miss My-Body-Is-a-Temple finds out how much she likes to fuck, then breaks up with me and gets pregnant.”
“Dalton,” Faisal said, like enough was enough, like he knew the whole story and needed Dalton to shut up as much for Michael’s sake as for Matty’s.
My moment—Charlie’s moment—had come and left a gigantic, lifeless crater. But not Matty. Matty had had her huge, shattering moment with her mother before ever dealing with Dalton, and she had come out gleaming and vividly alive.
She was the life that refused not one, but two extinction events.
Who the fuck was I, lost and robotic in the aftermath?
Michael didn’t say anything else—he was too busy staring at the stormtrooper and not blinking. When Dalton looked like he was about to keep talking, Michael cleared the space between us and the stormtrooper in two strides. He was only a couple of inches away from Dalton’s face when he said, “Enough.”
Michael wasn’t Charlie, but the more he talked to Dalton, the more he edged into Charlie territory.
“What’s the matter, Mike? Think you have something special with her? Join the fuckin’ club.” He was smiling but his face was pale and sick-looking.
“You’re full of shit,” Michael said, still just a couple inches away from the stormtrooper.
“Mike, stop,” Matty said. And this time there was something in her voice. It’s the hardest thing in the world, watching the ones you love try to take on your blowback.
“You don’t know anything about us,” Michael said. “About her.”
Dalton’s eyes darted back and forth between Mike’s like he was reading every intimate line of personal narrative on his face. “Holy shit. Holy shit,” he said, smiling. “She told you you were her first.”
“Fuck you,” Michael said.
“Do I look like I’m lying?”
All of the frequencies in the house hummed down to one buzzing note—it was the house’s beating heart in the basement. It was Matty breathing through her nose. It was the murmur of music and conversations from the porch.
Michael turned toward us. “It’s true, though. Right? Matty?”
Matty winced her eyes shut for half a second.
“Mike…” Faisal said, his hands half-raised and his head shaking back and forth in a “just shut up, man” motion.
“No, I just want to make sure. Matty?”
Dalton let out a short, humorless laugh and Michael spun on him. “You shut up.” He turned back.
“I know the baby’s yours,” she said, rubbing her stomach. She tried to smile but there was something nervous in her eyes.
“No, I’m not kidding. Forget the pregnancy pouch. I don’t care that you slept—” He took a breath. “That’s your business. But you told me I was your first. You lied.”
“Mike…” she said.
“I thought that was our thing. Honesty and transparency. Whatever. I thought that was our thing. Why would you lie?”
“But he’s a stormtrooper,” I said, which I felt was the most obvious and important fact in the room.
“I’m sorry. I just— I need some air.”
He walked out.
“Michael, wait—” she said to his back as he left, slamming the door in his wake. She didn’t go after him; she turned her attention to Dalton. It only lasted a millionth of a second, but there was wrath in her eyes.
Then it was gone.
“We’re leaving,” she said to us.
“What? Fuck you, you don’t get to keep walking away from me, Matty.”
As we walked after Michael, I unclenched my fist and realized I was still holding the tablet. I held it up and caught his attention because I was still drunk and if I didn’t do something, I knew I was going to start crying because I couldn’t stop seeing the worst parts of my life replaying in front of me all the time. Whether it was a house show or a campfire story, everything brought me back to Charlie and it was exhausting. Right when you think you can escape your moment, you realize that it will always be able to hurt you.
He scoffed and, after a second, said, “Thanks,” holding his hand out. I pulled it back.
“Is this what you were trying to give Sexy Tree Girl, stormtrooper?”
Matty stopped at the door and looked over her shoulder. “What were you doing over there?” she asked before he had a chance to respond to me.
“What do you mean ‘what was I doing’? You don’t get to be jealous of me, Matty. We broke up. You broke up with me, remember? And you, that’s mine; give it back.”
“Tree Girl’s drunk,” I said, less careful with my enunciation.
“So am I,” he said like a smug son of a bitch.
“Not as drunk as her,” I said.
“I asked you a question,” Matty said.
“Matty, that’s enough. This is starting to piss me off, okay? I was just having a good time with my friend.”
“I don’t think she wanted to be friends with you. Which is why she kept not wanting to touch your penis,” I said, pointing between his legs in case he didn’t know what I meant.
“Moses, can you hand me that?” she asked, pointing at my hand holding the pill.
“Oh come on, Matty, don’t. Would you just let it go? And you,” he said, pointing at me, “would you just fucking shut up?”
I handed it to her.
“What is this?” she asked.
“It is ecstasy,” I said. “Methylenedioxymethamphetamine. MDMA and a shitload of syllables.” I blinked a couple of times and then opened my eyes as wide as I could because my vision kept getting all blurry. We’d had to make anti-drug PSAs freshman year; it made sense at the time to read up on every illegal substance I could. “In 2007 it was ranked the 16th most addictive and 13th—no, 12th most harmful recrea—”
“Thanks, Rain Man. I sell to her all the time, I wasn’t doing anything she didn’t want. Don’t make this something it isn’t,” Dalton said.
Even as drunk as I was, I could see the wrath coming back. It flooded in from whatever oceanic depths were behind Matty’s eyes and she said, calmly and unwaveringly, “What would your mother think?”
Matty was still standing, and it made me laugh in relief.
The parrot squawked, “Squeeze the universe! Bitten off with a smile!”
But I didn’t squeeze the universe, and all I’d done for the last ten months was bite everything off with a smile; even now, as my guts warmed, as I realized how awake I was for the first time in months and months, I chose to simply bite the matter off with a smile and refuse to really tell them who I was. But the more I watched Matty, ceaseless against her clawing past, the more I wanted to.
Faisal inconspicuously reached over and tapped me on the elbow. When I looked over at him he whispered, “Watch this,” then nodded toward Matty.
Dalton raised his eyebrows. “What? Whatever, Matty, it’s good to see you,” he said, the corner of his lip twisting into a faint smile, and he didn’t go anywhere. “Good luck with your little brood.”
She looked at the blue tablet in her hand before dropping it into a not-quite-empty, boot-shaped cup on the table next to us.
He sighed, tapped his finger against the rim of his cup, and said, “Great, good. Those aren’t cheap. You win, I guess. Are you happy now?”
“I said, ‘What would your mother think?’”
Nobody had thought to ask me that kind of question after the bowling alley. They were always much more interested in what God thought than what my mother and father thought.
“What? Look, I’m sorry I said that stuff in front of Mike. Probably shouldn’t ha—”
“What the fuck made you think it was okay to put your hands on her?”
He laughed and his eyes were watery. “I already told you, she’s a friend and I sell to her all the time.”
“You still didn’t answer my question,” she said.
“What? What question?”
“About what your mom would think.”
“So now you want to talk, huh? Can we talk about what we’re really talking about? The little bundle of joy you and Mike made? Because it’s my business too. Do you know how fucking ruined I was after you? You were the bomb that went off in my life, Matty.”
She dropped her hand to her side, her fingers hovering over her pocket. As soon as the obviously-garbage-picked grandfather clock against the wall chimed midnight, she drew out her phone. “I forgot about you.”
If her breaking up with him was the bomb that had gone off in his life, this was the nuclear winter that followed. “No you didn’t,” he said. He was drowning in her.
“I did. And I forgot about the pressure—I forgot about all the degrading little comments and the jokes and the secrets, all of the little weapons you used because you wanted to get off.”
She used her words like a prizefighter uses haymakers, swinging heavy blows that pushed him against the ropes.
“They were jokes. I was hurt. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made jokes. I mean, you did break up with me at my grandma’s funeral.”
I snorted.
“Something funny?” he asked me.
“It wasn’t at her funeral,” Matty said. “It was after. When I wouldn’t have sex with you and you called me a cocktease.”
“I was mourning!”
“You were horny. That’s not an excuse. And that was how you did it every time: shame and guilt.”
“I loved you. I never mea—”
“Stop making excuses.”
“Matty, come on. I said I’m sorry, okay? If it helps, I’m not mad at you anymore. I forgive you. I just want you to forgive me too.”
She pressed a button on the phone and placed it to her head before saying, “I don’t need forgiveness.”
Faisal grabbed an anticipatory handful of my sleeve.
“You gonna try to call Mike back? Fine. Good idea,” Dalton said. “Give him a call. Great. Look, he’s right: transparency is the key to relationships.”
A college student dressed either like a pirate or a poet came in with a staggeringly drunk and exquisitely bearded wizard. The wizard kept leaning on him and mumbling into his ear, gesturing grandly with his staff made entirely of taped-together beer cans. Several cups and pictures were knocked off of shelves.
Matty held up a “hang on, I’m on the phone” finger.
“Hi, Mrs. Emmory?” Faisal and I both realized what she was doing at the same instant and both snapped our entirely undivided attention toward the stormtrooper; we saw all of the air come out of him. All of the bluster, all of the fire—he’d never stood a chance. “Hi. Sorry to wake you. I just wanted to let you know that Dalton still sells ecstasy. He used to keep it in the urn on the mantle. And he probably still does.” She nodded, locked her eyes on him and said, “Yeah: that urn.”
The things in her haunted past never stood a goddamn chance, and I wished I could be like her. I wished I could lay atomic waste to all of the footnotes of my life.
The tiny blue tablet with an anchor on it in the boot-shaped cup had dissolved to almost nothing.
“I—I’m on probation. Matty, what are you—what are you doing?”
He started to move toward her. He moved like he was dreaming. Like he was watching all of his bad decisions catching up to him. Matty’s eyes went fierce. She stared deep into his devastation and pulled the trigger one more time, just for good goddamn measure.
“Mrs. Emmory? Your son treats women’s sexuality like it’s something to be ashamed of. He treats sex like a weapon and I know you raised him better.” She hung up without looking at the phone or breaking eye contact with Dalton.
“Pardon me,” the pirate/poet said, stepping between them. He had a piece of folded paper in his hands. “Sorry. I was told to read this to the … stormtrooper?” He pointed at the punch-drunk Dalton.
Dalton blinked a few times. “What?”
The parrot in the other room fluttered around and said, “I am Lazarus!”
“It says…” He squinted and unfolded the paper, leaning his head back to read through his glasses. “Faisal: dick punch.”
Directly behind Dalton, the drunk wizard pulled his beard down and said, “Bluff clause, motherfucker,” and in one fluid, downward motion twisted the stormtrooper helmet down and pantsed the awful asshole.
Faisal was a blur. The noise his fist made when he punched Dalton Emmory in the penis was not the sound of ham getting slapped, but the sound of victory. Dalton Emmory twisted around and tripped over the space pants around his ankles as he curled into a ball on the floor.
The trio bounded toward the door.
I knelt in front of Dalton.
First song that came to mind: “Back in the Saddle Again” by Aerosmith.
“In their defense, you were being churlish. And you have a really stupid fucking name.” I let the words slur where they needed to slur and stay in focus where they needed to be in focus. I just smiled.
“Moses! Come on!”
As I ran for the door, I yelled at the bird, “Fuck you, Prufrock!” with as many extra syllables as I could fit before I ran out of breath.