Orange Suitcase (4 page)

5

Eventually the sky purpled.

The sun's coming up, the poet said. We gotta read in five hours.

I walked to the bathroom. I gotta quit drinking, I said.

I gotta quit smoking, he said. He rose, too, to close the curtains.

I'd probably just start smoking again, I called out.

We all gotta do something, he said.

I finished and he was back in bed. He lit a cigarette. I stopped and looked at him.

Fuck it all, he said on the exhale.

I opened the door to put out the do not disturb for the morning. There was a no smoking symbol pasted to the center of the door. I hadn't noticed it earlier. I laughed.

It says this is a non-smoking room, I told the poet.

I know, he said, laughing. I called to complain about the smell when you were getting the beer. One of your maids's been fucking smoking in this room! The night lady manager person said she didn't know if she could move us to a new room till morning.

I started laughing with him and climbed into my bed.

We kept laughing for a long time, very drunk and very high. The room reeked of beer and smoke. The bed was soft and comfortable. Everything felt fantastic. It was too dark to see anything except the red light on the smoke alarm. I wondered how much smoke it would take to set it off.

The poet called out, What are you reading tomorrow?

Shitty story, I muttered. About a music critic and medication. You?

Shitty poems. Most of them have to do with medication.

I always enjoyed Paxil, I said.

I always enjoyed Percocet, he said.

We forced small laughs, and then everything was silent. Light spread from behind the curtains like matting for a frame. The refrigerator coughed and buzzed. We were asleep when the sun came up.

A couple sits at a table across

the room. I peer over my book to watch

their quiet fight. They rest silent and

full of hard gestures—steel hands and eyes.

“You're a bastard,” says the tattooed arm.

“Fuck yourself,” say jeweled fingers, clinking teacups.

Quiet fights are quite ordinary. Split

a relationship to see its odd rings.

I settle the novel and turn to watch.

They are fine, they are in the midst of love,

when sucking tells less than a touch,

when indifference tells more than a fuck.

A
friend emailed me a poem out of the blue from the Caspian Sea. I read it late last night after a five-hour bus ride. L- was asleep in her clothes on top of the duvet. I took a shower and then it was 2am; she was still sleeping. I sat wide awake and naked at the kitchen counter reading my email on the laptop and read the line: I am too ashamed to be unproductive. I toweled at my face and put on my glasses. A few lines later: I am the right man for the job. I rose to hang up the towel. I peed. I flushed. I put on some underwear and covered L- with a blanket. I went back to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I took out a beer and sat back down to write something. I stayed sitting. I need to get something done before I sleep, I typed. Then deleted it. Then retyped, then redeleted. I pondered the meaning of that word: redeleted. I typed the word: redeleted. I deleted. I revised. I am the right man for this job.

S
omebody said this:

     It could have been an amazing novella if he'd cut all the whale-science shit.

Somebody replied:

     You mean cetology.

S
ometimes a person might ask, “How did you two meet?” And if you answer, “We met in Bible Study ten years ago,” the asker will think certain things. And maybe those won't necessarily be things you want the asker to think about you, but at the same time they may be true things, true parts of a past you cherish. So when I got back to New York after a trip to Seattle and a student asked me, “Who's wedding were you at?” and I said, “A friend from high school,” I didn't go on and tell her that I knew the groom from Bible Study and Student Leadership conferences. Instead, I repeated a story a married actor-friend told me during the reception.

The actor and I had been sitting in the back of a pick-up truck, drinking our way through a bucket of expensive Northwest stouts and smoking thick cigars gifted by the father-of-the-bride. It was windy and the wafting cigar smoke smelled of salt. The mountains in the distance were beautiful with orange fire behind them. Puget Sound looked like a great puddle of oil. “Let me tell you something about my wife,” the actor-friend started. “Or rather let me tell you why I love my wife.” He swallowed at the correction. “Last weekend we were at the mall getting a gift and we started talking about our own wedding, how that guy had fallen in the pool with his tux on and how her sister was so drunk she jumped in to rescue him still wearing her bridesmaid dress. The sun was shining, birds were chirping…We were laughing and I was a little distracted when I went to unlock the car, but then the key wouldn't work, and I realized I'd gone to the wrong car; there was another the same color two spots away. So I looked back at my wife, who knew I was trying to unlock the wrong car, and she starts shaking her head and says, ‘Wow, I'm married to a fucking retard.' And then she smiles, you know, joking, but then she goes completely stoned face and says, ‘I don't think I can stay married to a retard—our children might be retarded.' So now we're, like, in character, and instead of laughing I say, ‘Don't you laugh at me, you fucking bitch, don't you dare,' but I say it a little loud, and now people are looking, right, because it's Saturday afternoon and we're in the middle of a mall parking lot. But we stay in character. So I move like I'm going to hit her, and she starts to pretend-cry and run off in the opposite direction. But I catch up and grab her arm, hard, like I'm all pissed off, and I yell in my best Brando, ‘No! Don't you fucking pull this shit! Don't you even fucking try to pull this shit here!' and so then she starts to really wail, ‘Somebody help me! Help!' And suddenly there's this old man pulling me away, and his wife is there too, or at least some old lady, and so this lady is petting my wife and saying, ‘It'll be okay, honey, don't you worry, it's okay,' and this old man's like, ‘A man doesn't treat a young lady like that, get your hands off of her, be a man,' etcetera, and my wife keeps crying and overacting, saying things like ‘Oh Lord I'm so afraid! Oh Jesus help me!' and she's clutching onto this little old lady as if for dear life. So now there's really a crowd of shoppers forming around us, and I'm starting to get a little nervous, you know, because I think people are getting the wrong idea, that maybe we've pushed too hard this time, and I'm trying to figure out whether or not my wife is getting nervous too. But then everyone is talking and I hear someone ask her, ‘Is that your husband, sweetheart?' And she says, still all in tears and choking, ‘He's…he's my father!' and at that I just lose it, just start cracking up, because we watched Chinatown the night before and that was what she was referencing, you know, that last scene. So at that point she sees me laughing and she starts laughing too, and everyone around us just sort of is standing around like a bunch of retards wondering what the hell is going on, and that's when my wife yells out, ‘Run, Jack!' and so we run to the car and get in and drive away.”

T
he old farmer rocked in his white rocking chair, snoring. Paint flakes fell from the arms, a white circle around him. High in the tree, Ben and I loaded our guns. The shotgun that killed Mr. T rested across the farmer's lap and his snores carried; his head tilted back, jaw open. I watched through the cedar's flat needles. The chair creaked. The farmer's fat and angry wife was nowhere to be seen. I looked across the limb at my best friend and saw what he was thinking: That sonofabitch killed my cat. Ben pumped his gun and a smile split his face like a gash. Everything was exactly as we'd planned. I didn't want to be here, but I had promised. I stared down the barrel to Old Farmer Ed's open mouth and checked the safety. My fingers were sticky with pine sap. I tapped at the trigger and aimed at his crotch, remembered the time he caught me in his yard chasing a football. The fat wife had called my mother, said I was stealing carrots from her husband's garden. I looked at Ben; I felt like crying but I had promised. Aim for his crotch, he told me again. I am, I said. I looked down the barrel. A promise was a promise. My eyes were wet, itched, and I held my breath. My heart felt tremendous in my chest, growing, hugely inflating, and then everything broke.

1

W
hen I was six years old I loved basketball and hated church. I dreamed in Spalding orange. Traffic cones and life vests, reflective spray paint and plastic pieces of fruit. I had an orange bike, orange bunk bed, orange crayons worn to their nubs from the orange drawings made during Mass. When I asked my mother what to pray for while others went for Communion, she said to talk to grandpa (who died before I knew him). Tell him what your life is like, she said. Tell him about your new bike. Tell him about your friends. Ask him to watch over you. I knelt in church and remembered the one memory I had. Repeated it until it was fake:

My grandfather in a chair. A Frisbee. He is too sick to play; I go outside and throw the Frisbee in the air to myself. Orange on blue. Like a basketball. My goldfish. My bunkbed and bike.

What was his favorite color?

It felt like talking to a stranger, and so I asked God to help me play basketball for the Chicago Bulls. I prayed to be like Michael Jordan. I want to be like Mike, I strained, and clenched my hands together against the pew in front. I imagined myself in a Gatorade commercial; I saw myself in black and white. I saw myself sweating orange and dunking.

2

At night I dreamed of an orange suitcase among my Legos. In the middle of a summer thunderstorm I dropped from my top bunk and tore apart the tiny city in a search. It must be here, I thought. God wouldn't make me dream something untrue. Buildings fell and I cut my small hands on the corners of tiny bricks. My parents discovered me on my floor in tears. Destroyed pirate ships and castles surrounded me. A pile of blue and red and green tiny suitcases. Someone said: He's afraid of the lightning.

3

Does God cause dreams? I asked Ben's mother. She was our Sunday school teacher, handing out pencils and papers before class. What do you mean? she asked. I told her I dreamed I had an orange suitcase. I prayed for God to give me good dreams. But God must have known what I really wanted was an orange suitcase, right? Was God making fun of me for praying bad, Mrs. Jensen? She looked at me and seemed scared. I remember thinking, Adults get scared. She said: Stop crying, Joey, it's okay. Just remember, God loves you, and when you pray, all you have to say is thank you. Thank you for loving me, God. Say that and God will know that you love him.

1

M
y grandfather swims ahead, a bag of frozen peas in hand. I struggle to keep up, sputtering in the too-big snorkel we've rented from the resort. The reef turns kaleidoscopic below, pinks and greens in the turquoise water. Yellow and orange fish flit about like birds and squirrels in blackberry bushes. My grandfather treads water up ahead and waves at me to catch up. He looks strange in his blue mask, like a kid version of himself or my father. I taste salty plastic and listen to the wheeze of my breathing in the tube. I am just a few feet away when he rips the bag of peas in two. A cloud of fish surround us at once, like the petals of a great tropical flower rising up from the sea floor. I feel them slither against me, on my legs and arms and cheeks. I reach out towards my grandfather and watch a yellow fish suck my finger.

2

I wake in the middle of the night to the phone ringing. I hear coughing, my father saying, My dad-, my mother saying, At least. I wait all night for them to tell me.

3

I am swimming alone with a bag of frozen peas in hand. I watch the reef beneath me, wonder how many generations separate these fish from those before. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn; my grandfather is there, suddenly, unmasked, grinning, reaching out to where a giant turtle appears as if by magic, slow and graceful as an elephant, until we are carried apart by the current.

T
he smell of mildew, recognized only after.

The feel of a dead turtle's shell against a woman's bare stomach.

Maybe a leather couch in a basement; the first time touching a breast (by accident) beneath a blanket. Pearl Jam on the stereo. Pop cans and pretzels, crumbs stuck in old orange carpet.