TROY POKES HIS HEAD out of the bedroom as soon as I come in from work. He’s got that look, like he’s been up all night and made an important decision. I’ve seen it before. When he was going to study hypnosis and open a clinic. When he was going to move to Berlin to marry some girl he met online. When he thought he had the lottery figured out.
“Want to go for a walk?” he says.
Troy weighs 450 pounds. He has no chin, no waist, hasn’t seen his dick in years except in a mirror. The only time he leaves the apartment is once a week to drive to the supermarket, and then it takes him fifteen minutes to haul himself back up the stairs from the carport to our place after paying a kid from the neighborhood to carry his bags.
And he wants to go for a walk?
“Around the block,” he says. “For exercise.”
I’m beat. Still can’t get used to working nights. It’s the kind of constant fatigue where you feel like you’re floating an inch off the ground, where you see things out of the corner of your eye that aren’t really there. Right now all I want is to guzzle a few beers and hit the hay, but Troy is my only friend in the world, and that should mean something.
So: “Sure,” I say. “Let’s go for a walk.”
First come the stairs. Troy clutches the rail with both hands and descends sideways. Two steps, rest. Two steps, rest. I cradle his elbow in my palm.
We’re on the second floor of one of those open-air complexes that’s wrapped around a few messy beds of tropical greenery and a tiny swimming pool. The sun only shines on the water for an hour or so in the middle of the day, when it’s directly overhead. This early, the pool is still in shadow. The deck chairs are empty, and a beer can drifts aimlessly in the deep end.
“You’re doing great,” I say to Troy when he reaches the bottom of the stairs.
He’s better on level ground, more sure of himself. We walk past the mailboxes to the gate and push out of the complex into the bright, blaring morning. Gardeners are doing their thing all up and down the street, lawn mowers and leaf blowers, and a disgruntled garbage truck snatches up dumpsters, flips them over to empty them, then slams them back to the pavement.
It was hot yesterday, and it’s supposed to be hotter today. Troy wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He hikes up his pajama bottoms and sets off stiff-legged down the sidewalk toward Hollywood Boulevard, his arms extended out from his sides to help him balance.
“Damn, man,” I say. “You sprinkle speed on your Wheaties?”
“I’ve got to start taking care of myself,” he huffs. “If I don’t do something about my weight, I’ll be dead in five years. And I don’t want to die.”
“Me neither,” I say, “I don’t want to die either,” but that’s a lie. Sometimes I do.
Troy only makes it as far as the liquor store before running out of steam. A hundred yards. He leans against the building and gulps air like a flopping fish. His face is bright red, and his Lakers jersey is soaked with perspiration. I ask if he’s okay.
“Will you go in and get me a Coke?” he says, fishing in his pocket for a dollar. “Diet.”
I bring the soda out to him. He drains it quickly, and we start back to the apartment.
“Tomorrow I’ll go a little farther,” he says. “And the day after that, even farther.”
I’m pulling for the man, definitely, but I remember the hypnosis clinic, Berlin, and the lottery, so the best I can do for now is humor him.
A lemon drops off a tree and rolls across the sidewalk. I nearly trip and fall trying to get out of the way. Time for bed.
I NEVER THOUGHT about life before mine started to go wrong. I just lived it, like everybody else. But then you lose your job, and your wife leaves you for the neighbor and takes your kids, and you go from whiskey to weed to coke to crack just like the commercials warn you will. You lie and cheat and steal until one night you find yourself holding a knife on this guy, Memo, who’s supposed to be your buddy, your partner in crime, and Memo gets the jump on you and gives you a concussion and you come to in jail the next day, bleeding out of your ear.
Stuff like that raises questions: Why me? What next? Where will it end?
THE SUBWAY I work at is half a block from a hospital, which is where most of our customers come from. The restaurant is open twenty-four hours, and I’m on from midnight to nine a.m. Some nights are dead, just me and the radio, and other nights it’s so crazy that I’m tempted to tear off my apron and call it quits. The reason I don’t is that this is what starting over is like. It’s hard. It’s minimum wage and night shifts and managers who are fifteen years younger than you.
I got this job after rehab, when I transitioned into a sober-living facility, and I’m still here, ten months later. The part of me that once made a hundred thousand a year and had four salesmen under him is unimpressed, but the part of me that was living in a park and breaking into vending machines for dope money can’t thank me enough.
Two Korean teenagers slink into the restaurant around 2:30 a.m. One of them is holding a bloody T-shirt to his shoulder. He slumps, pale and silent, in a booth while his friend orders sandwiches.
“Your buddy all right?” I ask.
“He got shot,” the kid at the counter replies. “We’re going to Kaiser after.”
People do this a lot, stop in on their way to the emergency room. They eat something first because they know they’ll have to wait hours to be seen. A guy came in a couple weeks ago with a nail through his foot. He’d been messing around drunk with a friend’s tools. Said it didn’t hurt except where the nail was touching bone.
I check the booth after the kids leave, wipe away a smear of blood. My favorite show is on the radio, After Midnight. The host is talking to a man who found a hole in the ground that he claims is a portal into hell. He lowered a microphone into it and recorded the screams of the tortured souls.
“That’s ancient Latin,” the man who discovered the hole says.
“What are they saying?” the host asks.
“‘Save me.’”
About four a woman comes in and orders a cup of coffee. It’s rare I get a lone female at this hour, and when I do, she’s usually bundled up like an Eskimo and pushing a shopping cart. This chick is gorgeous. Arab. Armenian, maybe. Tall and thin with olive skin and long black hair. She’s wearing jeans and a pink blouse, a white sweater over that.
“You work at the hospital?” I ask as I slide her cup across the counter.
“No,” she says with some kind of accent. “My daughter is there.”
I notice that her eyes are red and swollen and that her mascara is smeared, and I feel bad. Here she is, going through some sort of tragedy, and I was imagining what she’d look like naked.
“No charge,” I say, waving away her money.
“Please,” she says. “Take it.”
“Really. My treat.”
She pushes the bills into the tip jar. Her fingernails have been chewed to the quick. She sits in the booth by the window and stares out at the electric orange night. A bus blows past full of people going to work, and I begin to prep for the morning rush. After an hour, the woman tosses her cup in the trash and calls out a thank-you as she leaves. The pale creep of dawn is filling in the blanks outside. Another goddamn Tuesday, gentlemen. Let’s make this one mean something.
I WALK WITH Troy again when I get home. He goes twice as far, almost to where Spaghetti Factory used to be, where they’re putting in more condos.
“I think I’m losing weight already,” he says.
I check my e-mail on his computer while he’s in the shower. There’s something from my son, who’ll be fourteen in September. Sick Shit is the subject. It’s a video of a kickboxer getting his leg broken in the ring, his knee snapping back the wrong way. I almost puke watching it. Every month or so the boy sends me something like this. Never a message, just a clip from YouTube, usually disturbing.
I haven’t seen him or his little sister in three years. My ex and the neighbor packed them off to Salt Lake City after they were married, and there was nothing this here crackhead could do about it. I was actually kind of happy they left. The kids were getting to an age where they’d notice my shaking hands during our once-a-month lunches at Pizza Hut, my red eyes, the smell of booze on my breath.
The last straw was when Gwennie, my daughter, found a bloody syringe in the glove compartment of the car I’d borrowed to drive down to Orange County for our visit. The rig wasn’t mine, but I still had to do some fast talking about how diabetic kitties need shots just like people do. That story always got a laugh from some asshole when I shared it at meetings.
I don’t go to AA anymore, and right now I’m so glad. I grab a can of Bud out of the refrigerator. I’ll never touch drugs again, but I need my three after-work beers. They’re all I have to look forward to these days.
Troy’s got Kelly’s Heroes and asks if I want to watch it with him. Maybe it’ll take my mind off my kids. He has a fifty-five-inch TV in his room, surround sound. I sit on the floor with my back against his bed. When the movie’s over, he says he’s going to order some chicken, but I’m not hungry. I’m not tired either, so I go down to the pool.
It’s nice. A breeze is blowing through the courtyard, and birds chatter in the bamboo and banana trees that fill the lava-rock planters. The pool mirrors the square of blue sky above it, clouds floating in the water. I take a deep breath all the way from my gut and pop open my last beer of the day.
The new people spill out of their ground-floor unit with towels and sunscreen and a pitcher of something. A guy and a girl, early twenties. They moved in a couple weeks ago and have already thrown two parties the property manager had to shut down. The guy’s playing music on his phone, the kind of shit kids dance to these days.
“This gonna bother you?” he asks, pointing at the phone.
“Not me,” I say.
They’re both tall and tan and in great shape. She has blond hair and big fake boobs; he’s darker, with a tattoo of a thorny rose wrapped around one thick bicep. They look like advertisements for something you want and want and then realize you didn’t really need.
A police helicopter flies low over the complex. The girl whoops and lifts her bikini top to flash it. When she sees me watching, she yanks the top down and says, “Oops. Sorry.”
The guy waves the blue plastic pitcher and calls out, “Margarita?”
I show him my beer. “Thanks anyway.”
I can tell he’s going to sit next to me as soon as he offers the drink. He’s got a buzz on and wants to talk to someone who won’t know when he’s lying and might get some of his jokes. His girlfriend is hot, he’ll say, but just between you and me, bro, dumb as a bag of rocks.
He’s Edward, she’s Star.
“Star?” I say. “Really?”
“Her parents had high hopes,” Edward explains.
The two of them are in from Miami to test the waters. If something happens and they decide to stay, the first thing they’ll do is get out of this shit hole and buy a house in the Hills with the money Edward is due from some kind of settlement. He’s been bartending to keep busy, and Star dances at a nightclub. I give them six months out here, tops.
“What do you do?” Edward wants to know before he’s even asked my name.
Star is on the other side of the pool, where the sun is brightest, on her stomach on a chaise.
“I was a sales director,” I say. “Industrial refrigeration units.”
“If you hear of anything in entertainment, I’m available,” Edward says.
The guy’s not even listening to me. That’s okay. I sip my beer and stare at his girlfriend’s ass. I haven’t had sex since sober-living, when this Oxy fiend and I snuck off to the laundry room.
“You live with that fat guy,” Edward says.
“Troy,” I reply.
“That’s got to be weird. Does he stink?”
I had the same sort of questions in the beginning. I found Troy on Craigslist when I was looking for a place. His last roommate had skipped out suddenly, and he needed someone to make rent for the month. It was six hundred dollars for the bedroom or three hundred for the futon in the living room. I took the futon.
I’d never lived with a fat man before and wondered how it would be. He eats a lot, of course. Large pizzas, quarts of ice cream, a box of doughnuts in fifteen minutes flat. He sleeps in a sitting position, propped up on the bed with pillows, something to do with his breathing. And he snores, man. He snores like a car that’s ready to conk out. That’s the only good thing about working nights.
He wasn’t always so big. He showed me photos of himself when he was in high school, and he looked like a jock back then. He got sad, though. He came out here from Ohio to be an actor but ended up office manager for a chiropractor, and that did him in, the disappointment, after being so sure he was born to do something special. He let himself go, lost his job, and now he squeaks by on disability and the occasional check from his parents.
“Does he lay like the biggest shits you’ve ever seen?” Edward continues.
“Troy’s great,” I say.
Edward is already on to something else, the time Sean Penn showed up at the bar where he works. I let him finish the story, then go upstairs. I can tell I won’t be able to get to sleep, that I’m going to lie on the futon and listen to the afternoon pass on the other side of the blinds while thinking about my kids and how I’ve probably fucked them up for life and wishing it was like it used to be, when I could knock myself senseless with whatever was at hand.
A COUPLE OF days later the Arab woman shows up at the restaurant again, at four a.m., just like last time. There are dark circles under her green eyes, and her fingers tremble when she passes me the money for her coffee.
“How’s your daughter?” I ask.
Her response gets caught in her throat. She swallows hard, and a tiny, perfect tear slides down her cheek.
“Aww, hey, I’m sorry,” I say.
I duck under the counter and pop up beside her, but then I’m at a loss, not sure what I was planning to do. I can’t just stand there, so I pick up her coffee and guide her to a booth.
“Thank you,” she says as she sinks into the seat.
I hustle back to the counter and grab some napkins. She takes one and dabs her eyes with it.
“Sit,” she says, “please,” so I do. There’s a long silence while she pulls herself together. I look down at my knuckles, up at the buzzing fluorescent light on the ceiling. It’s uncomfortable being so close to someone else’s pain.
“My name is Zalika,” she finally says.
“Dennis,” I reply. “Nice to meet you.”
“Thank you for asking about my daughter.”
I was flirting when I did, trying to show that I remembered her, hoping for a smile.
“Unfortunately, she’s not doing well,” Zalika continues. “She was hit by a car and hurt very badly. She’s been in a coma for a week now.”
They were jaywalking across Vermont, Zalika and her twelve-year-old daughter, Amisi. Zalika made it to the curb first and reached into her purse for her ringing phone. A car came barreling out of the setting sun, out of nowhere. The driver slammed on his brakes, but it was too late. Zalika heard the first thud, as the car hit Amisi and sent her flying through the air, and the second, when Amisi crashed back to earth.
She turned and called for her daughter, her heart refusing to acknowledge what her brain already knew. Amisi! Where had she gotten to? That couldn’t be her, that tiny thing lying twisted and bloody in the gutter, arms and legs all at strange angles. Amisi!
“Don’t touch her,” someone yelled.
Two strong men held Zalika back, and she wanted to kill them. A woman tried to soothe her, knelt in front of her and spoke to her like a child. Zalika spit in her face.
Amisi has been in the hospital ever since, tethered to our world by tubes that feed her, fill her lungs with air, and filter the poison from her blood. Zalika is at her bedside constantly, except for when she steps out for these early-morning coffee breaks.
“The doctors don’t say it’s hopeless, but I can hear it in their voices,” Zalika says. “They’re giving me time to say good-bye, but soon they’ll lose patience.”
She raises her cup to her lips and takes a drink to stop herself from talking, as if by not voicing the future, she can escape it. And what can I do but say what everyone says in a moment like this? “Don’t give up hope. Anything can happen.”
Zalika doesn’t smile, but something softens in her expression.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” she says.
“No,” I reply.
“Good.”
The door buzzes, and two Filipino girls in pink scrubs enter. I return to the counter to help them. Zalika leaves while I’m filling their order.
TROY SHOWS ME a bag of lettuce.
“Should I get an extra for you?” he asks.
I came to the supermarket with him because I didn’t have anything better to do.
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll grab some dressing.”
All Troy eats now is soup, salad, and Cheerios. A diet he found online. I mostly live off sandwiches from work, one at the beginning of my shift and one at the end.
“You need to watch what you put in your body too,” Troy says as he pushes the cart toward the tomatoes. “Just because you’re not a fat pig like me doesn’t mean you’re not fucking yourself up. You’ve got to plan your meals.”
“I’m more of a one-day-at-a-time guy,” I say.
“Come on, man,” Troy scoffs. “Don’t let that AA bullshit bleed over into your real life. You know what’s wrong with most drunks? They’re all about taking it one day at a time. They don’t think ahead. If they did, they’d say, ‘I’m not gonna get loaded tonight because I have to go to work tomorrow.’ It’s not one day at a time, it’s a hundred days at a time. You have to take control of your life.”
Troy is one of those people who get on track for a week and suddenly have the answers for everybody. I’ll remember to ask him about his amazing self-control when he’s back to making a meal out of a bag of chocolate chip cookies.
And I do have a plan. Step one: Save money. That’s why I eat at work. That’s why I sleep on a futon. I’ve got about a grand squirreled away already. Step two: Get a better job. My applications are in at Best Buy and Fry’s. I’m ready to jump back into it. Put me on the floor and watch me go. Step three: See my kids, show them I’m doing better.
Troy drops some tomatoes into the cart, and we roll over to the soup aisle. He needs ten cans of chicken noodle, ten cans of vegetable beef. My head hurts when I tap my temple. I stand there tapping, hurting myself, while Troy counts out his Campbell’s.
On his way to the checkstand he brushes against a spaghetti-sauce display. The thing topples over, jars exploding wetly when they hit the floor, sauce splashing everywhere. Troy is mortified. His face flushes bright red as a kid in an apron rushes over.
“Are you okay, sir?” the kid asks.
“I’m fine,” Troy says. His pajama bottoms are spattered with sauce.
I tell the kid that was a dumb spot to stack breakables, right in the aisle. What if it had been a toddler who knocked them over? I know he has no say in where the displays go, but I’m doing it for Troy, so everybody doesn’t assume the accident happened because he’s fat.
Troy’s quiet in the car on the way back to the apartment. I notice he’s limping as we climb the stairs. I’m drinking beer and reading Stephen King when he calls me into the bathroom, where he’s sitting on the toilet in his underwear. A shard of glass is sticking out of his massive calf above a trickle of blood. It’s a piece of one of the jars.
“Pull this out for me,” he says.
I kneel beside him and grip the glass with my thumb and forefinger. A quick yank is all it takes. More blood starts to flow. Troy doesn’t want to see a doctor. He asks me to patch him up as best I can. I rinse the cut, spread Neosporin on it, and wrap his leg in gauze.
A few minutes later he comes into the living room and asks if I want to go for a walk.
“Maybe you should skip today,” I say.
“Nah, dude, I’m good,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
I’m suddenly tired as hell, like I’ve taken a pill.
“I’m burnt,” I say. “Sorry.”
I lie on the futon, and I’m dreaming before Troy makes it down the stairs.
WHAT WENT WRONG? That’s another question I ask myself.
My parents? They were distant but kind. Both worked at the same insurance company, and when they asked my sister and me how we were doing each evening at dinner, the answer they wanted and got was “Fine.” We held up our end of the bargain; they held up theirs. A little bloodless, but better than the messes I’ve made.
My wife? Okay, we married too young and hung on too long. We were casually cruel to each other, and torment became a game for us. But that’s nothing unusual. You see it on TV every day. I can’t blame the kids either, although when they came along I had to divide what love I had in me into smaller portions, and it sounds selfish, but you know who got shorted? Me.
As for work, I’ve only met two people, a dope dealer and a marine, who truly enjoyed what they did for a living and wouldn’t walk away from it if they had the opportunity. A job is what you do to pay the bills. Some are better than others, but they’re all painful in a way. It’s a pain you learn to live with, however, not the kind that breaks you.
So what, then, spun me out, sent me sliding across the track and into the wall? Maybe I’m not meant to know. Maybe if all of us were suddenly able to peer into our hearts and see all the wildness there, the wanting, the fire and black smoke, we’d forget how to fake it, and the whole rotten world would jerk to a halt. There’s something to be said for the truth, sure, but the truth is, it’s lies that keep us going.
I STOP AT Goodwill to buy a sport coat and tie on my way to my interview. They cost me fifteen dollars. Best Buy called yesterday and said to come in at one and ask for Harry. The store is on Santa Monica and La Brea, so if I get the job, I can take the same bus I do now.
The chick at the customer-service desk has blond hair and black eyebrows. She’s a big girl, and her clothes are too tight. She looks me over with a smirk when I say I’m there to see Harry, wondering why a man my age would want a college student’s job.
Harry’s just a kid too, but he’s already going bald. His handshake is an embarrassment. I will eat him alive.
He leads me through the store toward his office. A hip-hop song is booming out of the car-stereo department as we pass by. Every other word is motherfucker. Two employees in blue polos are staring at the speakers mounted on the wall and bobbing their heads in time to the music.
“Hey!” Harry yells at them, his voice a frustrated squeak. “What did I tell you guys?”
“Sorry, man,” one of the employees says while reaching out to lower the volume. We move on, and I turn back to see the guy and his buddy bumping fists and laughing up their sleeves.
Harry’s office is a windowless box off the stockroom, barely big enough for a desk and two chairs. We sit so close together, I can see the sweat beading on his greasy forehead.
“So, uh”—he picks up my application and looks down at my name—“Dennis,” he says. “Why do you want to work at Best Buy?” He barely listens as I give my spiel about how my divorce threw me for a loop, but now I’m back on my feet and eager to use my sales experience at a leading chain like this one.
When I say, “Put me out on that floor, and I don’t care if it’s batteries, I’ll be the best battery salesman you ever had,” Harry just nods and starts telling me about benefits. I notice that his hands are shaking and he’s breathing funny. The guy is falling apart, and I’m pretty sure I know why.
When we get to the part where he asks, “Do you have any questions for me?” I say, “How long have you been manager?”
Harry fiddles with the name tag on his vest, the one that reads Harry Sarkissian, Manager. “Almost two months,” he says.
“It gets easier,” I say. “I know. I used to be a manager myself.”
Harry’s eyes fill with tears. “I bought a book from Amazon,” he says. “First, Break All the Rules. But it’s like for offices and stuff, not stores.”
“You want a tip?” I say. “Something that worked for me?”
“Okay,” Harry says.
“Blame everything on your bosses, the people higher up than you. Those guys out there, that music. Tell them the district manager got a complaint and said you had to do something about it. Act like you couldn’t care less, but the boss is on your ass, so you’ve got to get on theirs. Everyone understands shit rolls downhill. They can’t be mad at you, because you’re just following orders.”
“That might work,” Harry says.
“I guarantee it will,” I say. “You want another tip?”
“Sure.”
“Hire me. You won’t be sorry.”
I laugh to let him know he can take that as a joke, and he laughs too. We shake hands again, and he walks me to the front of the store and says he’ll call when he makes his decision, either way.
I’m feeling fine for once, even though it’s hot out on the street and the smog leaves a chemical taste on my tongue. I pulled what could have been a disastrous interview out of the fire and did my good deed for the day all at the same time. Baby steps toward something better.
I buy a fruit cup from a pushcart parked on the sidewalk in front of the store. The kid selling them sprinkles chili powder over the chunks of pineapple, melon, and mango, and I eat it sitting on a cinder-block wall in the thin strip of shade cast by a palm tree. My bus arrives just as I reach the stop. If I believed in luck, I might think mine had turned.
THE ONE-EYED COWBOY lingers at the counter after paying for his coffee and jabbers on and on about how he got bitten by a Great Dane when he was eight years old. I pull on plastic gloves and go back to refilling the ham and turkey bins, but he doesn’t get the hint.
“To this day I get the shakes around a big dog,” he says. “With little ones, I won’t pet ’em, but they don’t scare me.”
“Huh,” I say. I cut open a bag of Swiss cheese slices. “Wow.”
The guy’s wearing a black cowboy hat, scuffed snakeskin boots, and a bolo tie with a silver scorpion slide. His empty eye socket is a raw, red hole that made my stomach flip when I first saw it. What he’s doing on Sunset Boulevard at three in the morning, I couldn’t tell you.
“Now this”—he reaches up to tug the eyelid hanging loosely over the hole—“happened in a fight in Kansas City. Motherfucker got me with a broken bottle.”
He’s still telling stories fifteen minutes later as the door swings shut behind him and he swaggers off down the sidewalk. I wonder what it’s like when the dam finally breaks and everything comes spilling out. Maybe you feel better or maybe you drown.
They’re talking about UFOs on After Midnight. Are we being watched? Zalika shows up at four. It’s been a week since I last saw her, and I’m more excited than I should be. My plan is to tell her something about my life in order to break the ice between us, about Troy wanting to lose weight and me trying to help him. The look on her face stops me cold, though. She barely glances at me when she orders her coffee and keeps dabbing at her nose with a Kleenex.
“Rough night?” I say.
She nods, tears glittering in her beautiful eyes. I want to reach out and smooth away the worry lines on her forehead, the creases at the corners of her mouth. Instead, I watch her walk alone to the booth in front of the window, where she slumps over her coffee.
“What could these extraterrestrials possibly want from us?” the host of After Midnight asks the expert. “We’re like insects compared to them.”
I continue with the breakfast prep until Zalika suddenly wails and clutches her chest.
“What’s wrong?” I say as I hurry over and crouch beside her.
“They’re taking Amisi off the ventilator tomorrow,” she says.
We’re in each other’s arms then, just like that, just like when you reach out to stop someone from falling. She sobs on my shoulder, and I rub her back gently while murmuring, “I’m sorry,” again and again.
When she calms down, we sit across from each other in the booth. I hand her a napkin, and she wipes her eyes and fixes her hair.
“I’m ashamed for you to see me like this,” she says.
“I’m ashamed for you to see me like this,” I reply. “Is there anyone at the hospital with you? Your husband?”
Anger slides across her face like a cloud shadow passing over the desert.
“We divorced three years ago,” she says. “He took our son and moved back to Egypt. I chose to remain here, hoping it would be better for Amisi.”
“A friend, then? Do you want me to call someone?”
“Thank you, but no. That’s not my way.”
I understand. We don’t ask for help, people like us. We do our suffering in private, do our grieving in the dark.
“Let me get you more coffee,” I say. I go behind the counter and refill her cup, but she’s up and ready to leave by the time I return to the booth.
“I’m going,” she says.
To watch her daughter slip away. To say good-bye.
“Stay strong,” I say.
She turns and waves, and the morning of another terrible day creeps up on us like a thug with a lead pipe.
“CHECK ME OUT,” Troy says.
He stands in the doorway to the bedroom wearing a pair of jeans that’s as big as three pairs of mine. He pulls on the waistband until there’s a gap of about two inches between his stomach and the pants.
“I couldn’t even fit in these a month ago.”
I can see it in his face too. The walking and the dieting are paying off. He’s definitely slimming down.
He wants to celebrate by going to a movie. I’m not in the mood, but he hasn’t been to a theater in years, and I can’t say no after he offers to pay my way.
There’s almost nobody in the audience at noon on a Wednesday. A gang of fidgety kids on summer vacation and the harried mommy overseeing them. A worn-out old man toting a collection of battered shopping bags who’s just paying for a comfortable seat and air-conditioning, a couple hours off the street.
The armrests lift up, so Troy has plenty of room. He’s excited, telling me all about the movie before the lights go down. He’s been looking forward to it for months. I don’t know why. It’s a horror film, vampires fighting werewolves. Dumb. One of the actresses looks a lot like Zalika. She’s supposed to be evil, but I root for her anyway. Of course, she dies in the end.
We stroll down Hollywood Boulevard afterward, check out the stars on the sidewalk, the handprints. Some asshole dressed like Charlie Chaplin follows Troy, imitating his lumbering gait while the tourists laugh. I want to punch him in the mouth.
EDWARD OFFERS ME a cigar, but I turn him down. It’s two p.m., and most of the pool is in shade. Star is floating in the last sunny patch on a blow-up raft, wailing along to a song only she can hear through her headphones.
Edward is pissed. His car got towed last night, and he doesn’t have the money to bail it out. He asks if I’ll loan him three hundred dollars. I tell him I’m broke.
“What about Fatty?” he says.
Things haven’t been going well for Edward. He was laid off from his job, his new tattoo got infected, and now the car. The dude is furious, all jacked up on resentment and indignation. His bare foot taps out a spastic beat on the cement of the pool deck, and he keeps tightening and releasing the muscles in his neck and jaw.
A jet slides across the blue rectangle of open sky above us. I finish my beer and wonder if I’ll be able to sleep today. Star pulls herself onto the lip of the pool. She throws back her head and shakes out her hair like there’s a camera on her. Edward exhales a cloud of stinking smoke. He points at Star with the red-hot cherry of his stogie and asks me, “How much do you think someone would pay to fuck that?”
MONDAY AT EIGHT a.m. I’m making breakfast sandwiches for a couple of cops and trying to figure out what to do on my night off. The big cop is teasing the little cop about something, and the little cop doesn’t want to hear it. He keeps turning away and saying, “Okay, man, okay.” They both have shaved heads and perfect white teeth.
Zalika walks into the restaurant, and I almost don’t recognize her. That I’ve never seen her in the daytime might be part of it, but she’s also carrying herself differently, back straight, head held high. She has a big smile on her face, and suddenly I’m smiling too. The cops look over their shoulders to see what could make a man light up that way.
She steps to the counter when they rush off to respond to a call. She reaches out to take my hand, and a thousand volts of something leap from her into me and sizzle up my arm into my chest.
“You won’t believe it,” she says.
“What?”
“Amisi came out of the coma an hour before they were supposed to disconnect her, and she’s breathing on her own now.”
I’m as excited as if it were one of my own kids. I let out a whoop and slap the counter.
“The doctors are amazed,” Zalika continues. “There seems to be no permanent damage.”
A few nurses walk up and stand behind Zalika, waiting to order.
“You want coffee?” I ask her.
“No, no, I’ve had too much already.” She moves aside and motions the nurses forward. “Please, go ahead.”
I make the nurses’ sandwiches, wrap them, bag them. Zalika waits patiently.
“So what happens next?” I ask when the nurses leave.
“She’s being transferred to a hospital in Glendale,” Zalika says. “It’s closer to home and has an excellent rehabilitation program. She’ll be in physical therapy for a month or so but should be able to start school with her friends in September.”
And then it hits me: she’s here to say good-bye. I keep smiling, but my mind races behind it. I picture the two of us sitting down to dinner in a quiet restaurant, me in my Goodwill jacket and tie. She leans across the table and says, “Tell me about yourself,” and where do I start? “Well, I once had to explain a bloody syringe to my nine-year-old.”
More customers pile in. A cabdriver, a couple of doctors, a Scientologist in his goofy military uniform on leave from the big blue church down the street. Zalika takes a gift-wrapped box from her purse and lays it on the counter.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“A present, for being so kind,” Zalika replies.
“Come on,” I say.
“You don’t know,” she says. “Having you to talk to was important.”
She’s a nice person, and this is what nice people do.
“Well, thanks,” I say. “Should I open it now?”
“No, no,” she says quickly. “Wait until you get home.”
She takes my hand again, squeezes it, then turns away.
“Good luck,” she says as she walks out the door.
“Good luck to you,” I reply.
I WALK HOME instead of taking the bus, which is like a crowded coffin at this time of day. The city is wide awake and all a-rumble. The Russian who owns the liquor store is hosing down the sidewalk. He smiles around his cigarette and directs the stream of water into the gutter so I can pass. A city maintenance crew is doing roadwork. The sound of the jackhammer makes my heart stutter behind my ribs. A hundred degrees by afternoon, the radio said. The start of a heat wave.
When I get back to the apartment, I sit at the little dining-room table with Zalika’s gift in front of me. Distant explosions rattle the bedroom door. Troy’s TV. I unwrap the box and open it. It’s a watch, a nice Bulova. Stainless steel, tiny diamonds sparkling around the dial. I once lived in a world where men wore watches like this, but not anymore. The jackals around here would cut my arm off for it. I’ll put it on eBay and bank the couple hundred bucks I get.
I want to show the watch to Troy, but he doesn’t answer when I knock. Maybe he’s already on his walk, left the History Channel blaring. I open the door a crack and peek in to make sure. He’s lying on his back on the bed. His mouth is wide open, his eyes too.
“Troy,” I call out. “Buddy.”
He doesn’t respond. On the TV a kamikaze plane plows into the deck of an aircraft carrier and disintegrates into smoke and flame and white-hot shrapnel.
A MASSIVE HEART attack. That’s what Troy’s parents tell me. He died in his sleep, they say, never knew what hit him. I hope that’s true.
“He was doing so great,” I say as I help his mom and dad box up his possessions. “Exercising, eating right, losing weight.”
His mom is still suffering. She has to sit down every few minutes and fight back tears. I overheard her telling her husband how disgusting this place is. Pomp and Circumstance, Troy called them. His dad once asked him not to come home for Thanksgiving because seeing him so fat would make the other guests uncomfortable.
“I hope you told him to fuck off,” I said.
Troy shrugged. “They’re a little confused,” he said.
I only knew him for four months, and if his parents had asked, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them much about his life. His favorite food was pizza. He enjoyed war movies and old TV game shows. I don’t think he was ever serious about moving to Berlin and marrying that girl, but I think he liked thinking he was. He could hold his liquor. He didn’t believe in God.
I GIVE TROY’S ghost a week to clear out before I begin to sleep in the bedroom. Just when I start to worry how I’m going to make rent, Best Buy calls. They put me in personal electronics, but inside of a month I’m in charge of the computer department. It’s enough for me to pay my bills, eat out once in a while, and give Edward and Star some gas money for their drive back to Florida.
Both my kids e-mail me on my birthday, Kyle a cartoon of five fat pink pigs farting out “Happy Birthday,” Gwennie a little note addressed to Dear Old Dad. I call their mother and update her on my situation. She’s happy to hear I’m getting my act together but still hems and haws when I ask if she’ll let me see the children if I come to Utah.
“All I’m asking is that you think about it,” I say.
“I will,” she says.
I take a beer down to the pool. The swatch of night sky overhead is a livid purple, too bright for stars. Lights are blazing inside the apartments on both floors of the complex, and all around me people are settling in after a long day. They eat dinner, watch TV, talk to friends. It feels good to be in the middle of it.
One year ago tonight I was squatting in the basement of an abandoned house near Dodger Stadium with an old junkie named Tom Dirt. He’d picked up a check from the VA and managed to cash it without identification, and the money was burning a hole in his pocket. His knee was giving him trouble, so he said if I’d fly, he’d buy. I went to see my man and returned with a little tar for Tom and a fat rock for me.
We sat on a couple of filthy mattresses and got ourselves to where we needed to be by the only light we had, a few flickering candles that threw crazy shadows that kept me jumping.
Tom jerked out of a nod at one point and shouted, “Merry Christmas!”
“It’s not Christmas,” I said. “It’s my birthday.”
“Okay, so happy birthday,” Tom said, and coughed into his fist so long and so hard, I thought he was done for.
But he lived on, and so did I. Jesus fuck, it’s a mystery, all of it. Smoke a cigarette, change the channel, stare into space. Then go to sleep, go to work, and come home again, over and over and over, until all your questions are answered or you forget you ever wondered.