Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever (2 page)

I examine Vicky’s windowsills and look under her bed. Nothing. I open her closet to see if she still has that tee shirt I got her. It’s all black jeans and old kiddie clothes and a couple of fancy dresses, Christmas and wedding things. Probably she keeps her tee shirts in her bureau, but in the top drawer I find only socks and underwear, most of which is plain. But a few pieces are surprising, and I am glad the garments are all just stuffed in. If everything had been folded and neat she might notice that someone had been in here, though she probably would figure it was only her parents, spot-checking for weed.

There are a few lacy pieces, blacks and one red, not very risqué, really, just hard to imagine on Vicky. This thong with the leopard-print front, say, is almost unbearably cheesy, but if she were standing in front of a boy, as Sara stood in front of me last night, he would fall to his knees in worship—how could he not?—and maybe Vicky will not miss just a single
pair, if it is a black lacy and not the leopard print, of which there is only the one. I bring them to my nose—of course they only smell clean—then put them in my pocket and shut the drawer, thinking it is time to finish cleaning up and get going.

I turn around and there’s Amanda, standing in Vicky’s doorway.

I guess she took the whole afternoon off work, came home after her appointment. I wonder what the results were, and how long she has been here. Was she here this whole time, maybe taking a nap? She has been watching me, silently, and is still silent, though she seems about to speak right now.

It is next Wednesday and my mother is saying, “Why aren’t you over at Danny’s?” and I’m telling her anything, or else I’m walking in to McCarren’s, taking a seat at the far end, and Sara’s ignoring me at first but then coming over, rolling her eyes, bringing a foaming beer for me, saying, “You’re here early for a change,” and I’m giving her that same old smile, the one that barely makes rent, the one that coasts into the station on fumes.

It is not next Wednesday. It is still this moment and that will be true of every moment that follows, assuming this moment ever ends, which, if I am lucky, it won’t. Amanda filling the doorway, silent, us facing each other like friends or like family or like lovers: an eternity of silence and afternoon light. And she doesn’t even know about the cat yet. I will never escape this town.

T
he anarchists were drinking victory shots and making toasts because even though they’d never met with success before they surely knew it when they saw it or it found them. Snapcase, his beard effulgent with spilled drink, was sure that school was out for
ever
. He’d tossed Jessica’s survey of art history, his own
Norton Shakespeare,
and somebody’s copy of Derrida’s
The Gift of Death
into the fire pit they had dug in the backyard. The shallow hole was surrounded by salvaged chairs and shaded by a blue canvas canopy they’d stolen from some resort because property was always already theft anyway, and plus they had really wanted that canopy. The books were doused with whiskey from a bottle of Ancient Age. Snapcase lit a hand-rolled cigarette and then tossed his still-burning match into the shallow pit. It went out in the air, so he lit another and placed it gingerly in a little pool
of whiskey. It snuffed there. Someone said something about lighting three matches in a row. Somebody else said no, the expression was no three on a match. And how that expression had come from World War I, because if you lit three cigarettes off one match in your foxhole or trench the enemy in his foxhole or trench had three pins of light to triangulate your location and then he blew up everything or maybe just shot you and your two buddies.

Knock off the history book shit, Snapcase said. Where were the history books anyway? His fire was still unlit. The other anarchists who’d been watching were disappointed. I have to be at work in an hour, one said. Snapcase went back into the house for the history books. He ran into David in the living room.

But I like Nietzsche, David said, grabbing back his dog-eared copy of
The Antichrist,
which Snapcase had just taken from the bookshelf. Though no less certain in his convictions, David was not prepared to burn his
Dictionary of Critical Theory
and the books to which that book was a kind of skeleton key.

Yeah but if, Snapcase said.

Hey, why do you call yourself Snapcase? someone said.

Dude, someone else said, it’s a
band.
Don’t you know anything about hardcore?

David handed over his copy of
The Prophet Armed
because Trotsky had ordered the Russian anarchists shot down like partridges. Burn it, he said, and Snapcase went back outside. David eyed Estrella. She was finishing a rum and soda,
going to pour herself some more rum, discovering there was no more rum, cursing. The label was ridged with silver like pirate booty. The Captain leaned on his sword. The TV was on. With the left rabbit ear twisted down so it touched the thick steel strings of their red electric bass, they were able to get one local station. Not having cable wasn’t a statement. Maybe the statement was being made by the people who paid out a monthly portion of their slave wages for endless infomercials and Wolf Blitzer. Anyway it didn’t matter because there was only one piece of news today. A single clip had been looping for hours. It was a bottle of light rum that was empty. Hakim Bey and
Pirate Utopias
notwithstanding, none of them had much stomach for dark.

Estrella was the loudest anarchist of them all. Her band had a song that went
We’ll tear down fucking everything / Till stars are the reigning light / Estrellas y Rascacielos / Burning in the ungoverned night
. The bassist wrote the lyrics and she sang them. He loved it when she sang the line he wrote with her name in it. She loved singing her own name. The bassist always said he wrote the line in homage to the great Spanish anarchists, such as whoever. Actually it was because he loved her. When she sang her own name as part of his lyric it was like she had let him name her. She could sing so fucking loud. The band was a hardcore band. Her guitar roared like a certain kind of sermon. His bass rattled the windows and doors. The big gigs were coming soon; he just knew it. He was passed out under the kitchen table. The TV screen filled again.

David asked to see Estrella’s new tattoo. She lifted her black hoodie from the waist. A circled
A
nested between her breasts, which were too small to hang but would have hung if they’d been bigger. Estrella knew that bras were just more bullshit, though sometimes she would put on a sports bra if she guessed they were probably going to be running away from something before their night was over.

I thought it would be cool to get it on my nipple, she said, but the guy said if I did that I might never be able to breastfeed.

What? David said.

Snapcase gathered dead leaves and put them into the pit and then lit those, and finally the books caught fire.

It’s gonna rain, someone said.

It’s gonna pour, someone else said, and that person was correct. It had been raining earlier but that had been a mere warm-up compared to what would come; that is, with what came.

I like it, David said to Estrella, but it’s too bad.

He meant about her breasts, and not being able to get the nipples tattooed, or pierced even. He thought of the phrase
female troubles.
The silver ring centered in her lower lip gave her a pouty look, or rather accented the pout of her dark eyes and dark hair and the donned hood of the hoodie and the fact that she was frequently pouting. Her dreadlocks were wild and attractive. When she did push the hood back, as she had done, the dreadlocks made her seem more dangerous or unpredictable, but less severe. David wondered if her kiss
had a metallic aftertaste, or if the salt and wet of her would overwhelm everything else.

They drank whiskey and watched the fire burn in the shallow pit until the downpour drowned the flames. Then everyone went back inside to watch the TV. Someone said for smokers to use the front porch and someone else said we should be able to smoke inside on account of the rain and the occasion.

We’re out of rum and I don’t want any more whiskey, Estrella said.

The liquor store was closing up when I bought the rum, David said.

This is only the first blow against the empire, someone said, and someone else said, Yeah but what a blow I mean boy you know?

There was a line at the gas station when I walked past it, David said. It went around the block. Everyone was filling their tanks and buying up the canned food. I walked in and stole two big bottles of Coke and nobody noticed.

It’s on tape though, someone said. It’s in the files. Someone else said that Coca-Cola had sponsored death squads in South America and that person was correct. Coca-Cola was also responsible for the following: environmental devastation in India, union-busting, wage-slavery, rotting the gums of children and adults, inventing the modern image of Santa Claus as part of a plot to commoditize Christmas (actually, the modern Santa Claus evolved from a series of Thomas Nast illustrations that appeared in
Harper’s Weekly
between
1863 and 1865; the Coke Santa was done by the Swedish illustrator Haddon Sundblom in the 1930s, long after the archetype was standardized), partnering with McDonald’s, sponsoring various execrable campaigns, here and abroad, those death squads, and much more. So that person was really right for the most part when he or she said those things about the soda they were all drinking but at least had stolen.

I bet that one store’s open, Snapcase said, and we could go get beer. But I don’t want to go.

I’m really leaving now, said Roger, who sometimes went by Dagger but couldn’t commit to the alias. He fashioned a rain hat from a plastic bag in which some Chinese food had been delivered. He was the one who’d said earlier that he had to go to work.

Lots of people were milling around, watching the TV and deciding what they thought or already knowing or thinking they already knew. Nobody knew Estrella’s real name was Anne. Even the ones who had been
with
her didn’t know. She was that good. Sometimes she almost forgot she had a real name—she was
that
good. The rain beat harder on the windows. The shallow pit overflowed. David said he’d go to the store and Estrella said she’d go with him. She went to look for her boots. The anarchists pooled their money.

Angel, Snapcase, this guy they didn’t really know but who’d been crashing at their place, and Jessica were looking out the back window at the fire pit. I guess it’s a book
drowning,
Angel said, and the guy they didn’t really know mentioned Prospero and then someone put a Fifteen record on
and turned it up real loud.
Everybody knows authority is just abuse anyway / Everybody knows it ain’t no use anyway / Kill your elected official today / We will win…
Estrella couldn’t find her boots so David took his boots off in solidarity.

Muddy street dirt squished between David’s toes. He told Estrella they needed to go faster, and she ran so far ahead that he almost lost her in the shifting sweeping curtains of water. The storm was a North Florida special. They hurtled through it like airplanes. The water in his eyes blurred his vision. She’d pulled her hood tight but her dreadlocks were soaked anyway. She stepped on a little shard of glass, landed badly, and twisted her ankle. David caught up to her.

Ow, she said, I mean fuck. She shut her eyes tight because it hurt and because she didn’t realize that with all the water running down her face he couldn’t tell she was crying so she was safe.

She shifted to her good foot and hopped. She landed, wobbled, steadied herself, hopped again. David slid a hand under her arm, his other behind her knees. He lifted her and carried her through the rain like a husband with a wife or a monster with a cherished victim. He carried her to the nearest house that had an overhang. The sudden freedom from the rain was cold and thrilling. He helped her sit, then knelt before her. He took her wounded foot into his hands. She was sitting in a puddle but there was nothing they could do about that. The whole world was a river that day, rising: taking and bringing things. He cleaned her foot as best he could
in the puddle, wiping away the shiny trickle of blood that flowed from the cut on her sole. He suckled. The blood was metallic; his mouth did not even fill with it. It wasn’t a bad cut, really.

I think it’s out, she said. You didn’t swallow it?

I don’t know, he said. It was really small.

Is that okay? I mean will something happen to you?

I didn’t think about that, he said.

His selflessness touched her. She considered what that might mean. This tender moment was ending but they’d always have it.

They stepped back out into the rain. Estrella hobbled, David walked. The day had been good and it was still cresting. They had shared a victory and lived by their principles, especially those of solidarity and mutual aid. The store was open. The beer was cold. There would be time later for regret and whatever the bassist thought, but right then they were still free. A pair of real anarchists, they drank on the street as they strolled home even though it was broad daylight and still raining.

I
turned twelve on August 9, 1995, a few weeks before the start of the new school year and the same day that Jerry Garcia was dying in California, not that I knew it then. My parents had decided to have my party at the house, in our backyard: Slip ’n Slide, water balloons, the garden hose. I remember being worried it was too babyish but actually we had a pretty good time. Fun in the sun, you know? A real South Florida birthday. A Winn-Dixie sheet cake with a sports theme. I remember all of this so vividly, and can see myself living it, as if then-me is somebody else and now-me is a camera capturing him. Thirteen candles are lit (one to grow on) and I’m leaning in over the cake, waiting for the song to wrap up so I can blow them out. My best friend Kenny Beckstein and my dad are on either side of me, and the rest of the kids are clustered loosely around us, like apostles. My dad’s
smile is not forced, exactly, but you can see it’s strained. He and Mom had been arguing about something earlier. Kenny’s face is an altogether different story. He’s got this look of pure adoration, ecstasy really, like he’s never loved anything so much as he loves me right then.

I met Kenny in first grade. He was fat and I was a runt, a quick crier. We traded being last one picked for whatever the game of the day was, unless it was dodge ball, because I was so hard to hit. He and his big sister Angela were Irish twins—eleven months between them, and I was six months older than Kenny, so really it was like we were all the same age, but because of how the school calendar fell she was a grade ahead of us, and had gone off to the middle school last year. But now we would be middle schoolers too. Sixth grade.

But middle school wasn’t good to Kenny, who still brought a dweeby plastic thermos of grape juice with his lunch instead of a soda can. He got knocked around in the locker room. Cheeks flushed, eyes glistening, relaxed-fit jeans held up out of reach in that jock asshole Zak Sargent’s raised fist. Zak was in Angela’s grade. He was a golden boy, a terrorist. I tried to teach Kenny to hold his own, but the truth was that what I knew how to do was be invisible, and this made me angry—at myself because it was all I could do, at Kenny because it was the one thing he couldn’t. I lashed out at him, picked fights over anything stupid, said I was coming over and then didn’t come. By winter break I’d stopped talking to him altogether.

I told myself that Kenny languished on the one rung of the social ladder I knew I was above, though in order to believe this I had to first accept the increasingly dubious premise that either of us was on that ladder at all.

In seventh grade an invitation came in the mail: his bar mitzvah. His parents must have forced him. I was lucky to have checked the mail myself that day, because if my parents had seen it they would surely have forced me.

Kenny spent the summer after eighth grade with his aunt and uncle. Their kids were a little older and they had a summer place way up in Maine.

I saw him on the first day of ninth grade—high school, the
real
big time—down the hall from me, in motion. He was taller, and not so zitty as he’d been. He was lean now, hair the color of wheat and shaggy about his ears. We saw each other, thirty feet of emptying hall between us. The bell was ringing—a digital bell that sounded like some bag of microwave popcorn was ready. The linoleum floors were freshly buffed for the new school year and the light flung down by the fluorescent tubes screamed back up at the ceiling. It was like being trapped between two horrible moons. He nodded at me—one acknowledging chin raise, that was all it was—and I gave him the same back. We were zeroed out, I understood this, strangers about to meet for the first time, though we didn’t. Not then. We had classes to get to and were both late.

The same kids who had made middle school hell now greeted Kenny with elaborate high fives that climaxed with
finger snaps. They sought him out. He was seldom by himself, in the hall or at lunch, but retained a sort of loose air of aloneness, which is not to say he ever looked lonely. He was standoffish and comfortable, genial but indifferent. He let the cool kids buy pot from him and court his interest in other ways. He had freedom of movement in and through every circle. He came and went. People called him Beck.

Angela, by this point, had been a goth for a couple of years. She had dyed her hair black and gotten her license at the end of September. She started driving her mother’s old Volvo station wagon to school. Mrs. Beckstein drove a Saab now. I was old enough to go for my restricted license, but hadn’t. Usually, I walked home. It only took like a half hour, and everyone knew the bus was for losers, but when it rained I had to scrub a ride, and one gray October day it came to pass. The two of them were standing there, together in the thickening drizzle, while Angela finished a clove cigarette. It smelled like musky candy.

“What up, Beck?” I said. I had never called him that before. The pert little word felt too smooth coming out of my mouth, like my tongue wanted to stumble, but on what? The word was a slick river stone. He’d been Kenny our whole lives. But this was his thing now, right? I could do it the new way. A fresh start. The nods.
Just be cool.

“You still live six blocks from us?” Angela asked, and I couldn’t tell if the question was a jab.

She popped in a Marilyn Manson tape. Excluding that noise, we rode back to our neighborhood in silence, which
Kenny finally broke by asking if I wanted to come over and smoke some pot.

The Beckstein house hadn’t changed much. There was a new TV in the entertainment center, but the same old couch and lounger were side by side in front of it. I stood in the doorway and absentmindedly slipped my shoes off, assuming (rightly, as it turned out) that this was still house policy.

Angela turned back to look at me. I was just standing there, still in the doorway. I hadn’t even shut the door.

“Come on,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s all good.”

We went to Kenny’s room. He led, then Angela, then me. I was hemming close to her, like a newborn doe to its mother, and accidentally mashed her heel. “Sorry,” I said, and took a big step to one side. I felt like I was in a spotlight, on a stage. Kenny sat down on the gray-carpeted floor, leaning against his bed, and reached underneath, behind the dust ruffle. He pulled out a small green bubbler. He had his Oakleys pushed up onto the crown of his head like a tiara. He pulled the metal stem out of the bong and put his nose to the base. “I think this water’s still good,” he said, then sat it down by his knee while he broke up buds.

We sat with him on the floor.

A few bong loads made it around the circle, then Kenny reached under his bed again. This time he pulled out a shoe box. “Our cousin Jeff hooked me up when I was up there,” he said, meaning Maine, presumably. This was the first conversation we’d had since 1995.

In the shoe box were concert bootlegs—cassette tapes. The Grateful Dead, the Disco Biscuits, the Dave Matthews Band, and worse things. Cousin Jeff, I learned, had taken Kenny to this two-day campout concert thing called Lemon-wheel, thrown by a band called Phish at a decommissioned air force base near the Canadian border and named for a Ferris wheel they’d brought in for the occasion. The experience had apparently made a strong impression on Kenny. “Life-changing stuff, man,” he said, and rummaged, picked out a Phish tape, crossed the room, and popped it in. He hit
PLAY
, didn’t like what he heard, fast-forwarded to the end of the side, flipped it, and hit
PLAY
again. A guitar and piano were caterwauling. A cow bell went off like a dull shot. Something sounded like a vacuum cleaner.

After a while, Angela got up and left. It was impossible to tell how long, since the songs on the tape seemed to have no beginnings or ends, but rather melted into and out of each other. She said something I didn’t quite catch that amounted, I think, to “Good to see you, Brad,” and then she was closing Kenny’s door behind her. A few seconds later I heard her bedroom door shut, followed by the twice-muffled rumble of Skinny Puppy or Jack Off Jill or NIN or more Manson—whatever it was she was into. And now we were alone with each other. Kenny had his eyes closed and was bopping his head, rhythmically, though not exactly in rhythm with the music. He was parallel to it, I thought, or maybe the rhythms related in some way I couldn’t follow. I stared at him. Christ this was strong stuff, not like the dirt weed I’d been buying
from a junior named Omar, stuff that made you giggly for a half hour then left you with nothing but a headache. The busy, winding music fragmented my thoughts, alienated my mind from itself. Things felt murky and televised. I couldn’t help looking at Kenny—really drinking him in. He was stunning and I was seized with awe at the change he’d made, everything he’d sloughed off and become. I was still awkward, peripheral—the same as ever, save for the recent development of a downy mustache you could only see when the light was right. Jealousy washed over me, a sensation so powerful it was indistinct from either hatred or lust. The feeling lasted a deep stoned moment, which is to say I have no idea for how long. I felt choked, throat tight with need, mouth dry as if it had been swabbed out with a cloth. I wanted nothing but to cross that room and go to him.

I forced my gaze to the window. A dumb little grapefruit tree, the neighbor’s hedge, a blue recycling bin. Cars in driveways. Yes, anything normal. His bedroom walls were the same, sponge-painted pale blue over an eggshell base, but the old outer space–themed border was gone. There were music posters now: Bob Marley with his head thrown back, laughing; a garish
Steal Your Face
on black light felt; a full-page photo of the guys from Phish had been torn from a recent issue of
Rolling Stone
and taped to the wall by his desk. But wherever I looked, my eyes invariably wound up on him again: quickly away, long circle back. His eyes were closed. He was in deep space. I was fidgeting, making adjustments to hide a formidable erection.

“Totally bitchin’, isn’t it?” Kenny said, thankfully without opening his eyes. He meant about the stupid music, or maybe the quality of the drugs.

“Yeah dude,” I said. “For real.”

Angela would tear out of the school parking lot, wheels squealing because why? Because fuck
you,
is why, she’d have said if anyone had asked her. But who would ask? I loved the sound of the old family car yowling like an agitated cat. We’d pick up drive-thru burgers or Taco Bell, head back to their place, and get ripped. Her fat friend, Dawn, another goth, drove a black Suburban. She’d follow us back to the neighborhood, drop her car off at her house, then walk over.

Dawn was loud. She caked her face in some powder that couldn’t hide the craters in her cheeks; instead it cast them in white relief. Her eyeliner, black, ran in the heat. She believed she was making progress in the study of witchcraft and was objectionable on more or less every level. Angela said she believed in Dawn, that the fat girl
did
know magic. They would hang out with us as long as Kenny didn’t put his music on, which he inevitably did, because he hated Dawn fiercely. Indeed, she was one of the few subjects he allowed to trouble his easy-does-it-no-sweat veneer, I think because she reminded him of his old self. She had never learned to molt, and seeing her in the sweaty cage of her body unearthed the worst of what he had struggled to bury.

Kenny and I never talked about—even mentioned—the old days. I knew that to do so would be to betray him all over
again. It was a shame, though, because Angela was attached to Dawn, and I was hard-fallen for Angela, and I think on some level Kenny knew this, and in our whole lives he was never anything but kind to me. He would hold out on the music for as long as he could stand to.

It doesn’t get cold in South Florida until after New Year’s, and it doesn’t even get that cold. No scarves and gloves. A few weeks of sweater weather is about it. But November? Forget it. You could go swimming.
We should go swimming,
I thought. I was standing in the Beckstein kitchen, stoned to the gills, pouring myself a glass of orange juice.

“That’s stupid,” Dawn said.

“I don’t know,” Angela said. “Sounds kinda nice. Swimming high. Like the womb or something.”

“I don’t have a suit,” Dawn said.

“Go home and grab one,” Angela said. “We’ll wait for you, or if you want I can come with.”

Dawn gave her friend what was clearly intended to be a withering look, but Angela didn’t. This was to all of our surprise, including, I think, Angela’s. She said, “Well, I’m going to go change.”

Kenny loaned me a pair of shorts. I put them on in the guest bathroom, then helped him move the stereo out back. Dawn was sitting upright on one of the lounge chairs, smoking a clove. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off. She was already sweating.

“Not even gonna dip your toes?” I asked.

“Better not put on any of that hippie shit,” she replied.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her, “do you live here?”

“Neither of us lives here,” Dawn said to me.

“Hey Dawn,” Kenny said, “why don’t you shut the fat fuck up?”

Angela came out of the house. She was wearing a black bikini with string ties that rode low on her notchy hips. Her legs were a bone-white mile. There were freckles on her chest and face, a mole on her left shoulder. She seemed to catch fire as she stepped out from under the overhang and into the undiminished autumn sun. Her toenails, I saw, matched her fingernails, and both matched the bikini.
Okay,
I remember thinking,
I’ll just be in love with them both then.

Kenny lazed in the shallow end, floating on his back. Dawn lit another clove off the butt of the old one and sulked, watching her friend do laps. She didn’t want to be there, but it was a long time before she left.

Over winter break, Angela tore her Nine Inch Nails posters off her walls. Her fishnets, her black boots, her goth makeup—all down the memory hole. When we went back to school, she was in blue jeans with plain tee shirts and looked like she belonged in a public ser vice announcement.