Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (5 page)

One, one, one, one, one, one, I go, whispering. One, one, one,
one!
, like I'm pissed off, like I'm ready to punch myself in the face. I flip my bedroom pillow to the cooler side. I count sheep until the sheep melt into potatoes, and the potatoes stretch into pills, and the pills elongate into hospital stretchers.

Because when the paramedics strapped down Wicked College John, one paramedic folded up the wheels of the gurney while the other slid it into the ambulance. When I'd always thought maybe the wheels folded on their own, or always imagined how what if they separated from the gurney and coasted away, in a slow, infinite straight line that ignored gravity, the way a space shuttle peels from its tanks. And I figure out that I might be falling asleep, that tiredness has won only for now, and I'm finally no longer thinking about the zombie-mint smell of the hospital waiting area, or whether or not it's weird that Necro really wanted to sleep in his own bed and drove us back to our cars instead of waiting there longer.

But once the actual shape of my room appears through my closed eyelids—the sliding closet door with the
WEASE
bumper sticker on it, or, on my dresser, the Don Mattingly puppet I made from a milk carton in third grade—my brain thinks: Sleep has arrived! Then I realize I'm thinking this, and the stadium lights in my brain whoosh back on, and I jolt awake again, counting.

So when I sit up and get my night eyes, I decide to forget counting and focus, really hard, as a Sleep Portal, on this little glass particle, way off in my mind.

Hold on. It's turning into something.

I look at the light squeezing through the bottom of my bedroom door. As in, I can't remember if we always leave the hallway light on the whole night, or did Mom recently start leaving it on to make it look like we're awake when we're really asleep.

Like when I was way younger. Sometimes, I'd wake up around midnight. I could hear the dog-whistle-quiet noise from the living room's TV, and Real Dad through the air vent, watching
Mr. Show
, laughing angrily, like he was showing Mom he really got the jokes.

Or how, once, way even before that, when I decided to sneak out of my room, I could see Mom, at the kitchen table, staring at a four-pack of cigars she'd just bought—a hobby she'd taken on to one-up Real Dad's going to Bug Jar shows. But she threw up every time she smoked them.

And Real Dad would pass out in the bathroom, some Popcorn Wylie album sounding like tinsel through his Discman headphones, a large bottle of Cantillon half-f
next to the sink, some issue of
Preacher
face-down in his eczema foot bath. “Woman thou hast betrayed me!” he slurred into my shirt once, when I shouldered him to the living room couch. But I'd kind of agreed with him, because why else would you take a foot bath and read
Preacher
if you weren't right?

After we helped Real Dad move into his new place in Penfield, Mom took me out for a drive. “Did you really like your father?” she said.

“I don't know,” I sort of snapped at her. “I mean, didn't you?”

Her room is next to mine. I can't tell if I can hear anything in there.

There are times when I can sit in my desk chair at night, with maybe only the chalky fluorescent desk light on, and everything I've ever thought about before suddenly harmonizes into one chord. And when I stare long enough, the Fred Flintstone piggy bank on my dresser, suddenly, will look like a totem pole mask worn by whoever is going to come to me in my sleep and slit my throat.

Or, maybe this glass-particle feeling I'm feeling is that feeling when you stay awake in your room until you're sure the rest of your friends, who went out without calling you, have gone to bed.

So I start thinking that, maybe, the glass-particle feeling is like those times at night after I closed my eyes long enough and I couldn't tell if I fell asleep. I'd open my eyes, and the light at the bottom of my door would be gone. And the dishwasher would be on, sloshing water, like the inside of a dark mouth.

And the thing is, I begin to understand this glass-particle business more when I turn on CMF. Next to my bed, the red light from my radio's
ON
switch stretches out a few shadows in the dark. CMF has been playing the same eight songs in the exact same order between 4 and 5 a.m. for about four months. Def Leppard's “Hysteria,” the fifth song in the rotation, comes on. And, during the outro, when the band coasts on the D chord, it gives me this stomach-level feeling, which made me stay in my room all night when I was fifteen, imagining girls who I liked moving out of town, until Lip Cheese or whoever called to tell me that Necro wanted to climb on the high school roof that night.

And the feeling I get, I realize: The stomach-level feeling is this same actual fifteen-year-old feeling, this basic intro-to-sad kind of thing. Not like a looking-back kind of sad—like, “Oh, I remember those sad times.” The feeling I get now, while “Hysteria” ends, feels like I am actually in the present tense of being fifteen.

Like there are different levels of being sad. Fifteen-year-old sad, climbing-on-the-school-roof sad, DWI-ing-it-in-one-direction-until-gas-runs-out sad. They're still there, not gotten over, filed away. The Sad Archives, I'd probably call them. Here I am, still there.

That's what this glass-particle feeling is. The same way, when you dream, it can break your heart when someone forgets to bring a stapler to a funeral. But next scene, life is fine. But still, all the while, there's this voice in the back of everything you're dreaming. The kind of voice that, when I
finally do fall asleep tonight, asks, like it's the beginning of an AM station politics debate, if freinium hens can munter themselves.

When me, Necro, Toby, and Lip Cheese actually see Wicked College John in his hospital room, that's when you say “Shit” and have it mean something.

“Jesus!” everyone—except Necro—says.

The side of Wicked College John's face is food-poisoning pale, zippered with stitches. There's a Vaseline kind of shine to his forehead, a plastic tube up his nose and another in his mouth. A length of white tape stretches across his face like a handlebar mustache, and his cheeks are blotchy. A brown, telephone-receiver-shaped saliva stain is next to his face on his bed's scratchy pillow.

And the look on Toby's face: more terrified than the rest of us, blood leaving his cheeks. Something seems to change in his eyes—pupils shrinking, irises clenching into fists. He leans down, tie dangling, and he rubs his eyes and looks at me:

“Somebody knew we were there,” he says. “We just survived an assassination.”

“I grant that you have a point in that this is very messed up,” I say. “But maybe we should let the police . . .”

“Unacceptable. Somebody did this. This is pinning bow ties on the dead.”

Toby leans back, closes his eyes, exhales, and does a double-bass-drum pattern with his boots. “Pinning, bow ties, on, the
dead
,” he says, jabbing his finger into his chair's plastic armrest.

“What is that, a phrase?”

“It is a phrase, Nate. It's taking a messy situation, a death, and putting a little bow tie on it to neaten it up, to say This Didn't Happen. Pinning Bow Ties on the Dead. To cover up for the fact that this situation is much more of a nebulous, you know,
thing
. I handed that watch piece to the investigator last night, and nowhere on the news do you hear the headline: ‘Watch found.' You tell me that's not the police hoping everyone forgets about this and goes back to their bread makers and their 401(k)s and their freaking dollhouse lives—
unquestioning
.”

Necro stands up suddenly, twirls his keys, and relaxes his shoulders, and Toby spends a few seconds noticing this.

On a silver, pie-tin-shaped balloon tied to the armpads of a chair, a message says
WELCOME BACK
! Take-out containers of cold chicken wings and issues of
Maxim
have been stacked on the box heater below the window. On top of the magazines is a set of keys that has the Mercedes logo. The keychain tag reads
GET BETTER!

This, when, look at any of us in formal get-better clothing—my red white and blue Bills shirt with two buttons
and a collar; Lip Cheese's khakis and hair parted way off to the side; Necro's Native American braided square-dancing belt and blue jeans.

Wicked College John's Mom—whose heels you can hear stabbing the floor from down the hall—rushes back into the room from the cafeteria, comet-tail of perfume behind her because she's never not exasperated. “Can I also say you guys don't need to dress up like he's dead?” she says. “It's medically induced. People come out of comas every day. His brain is in, like, mint condition, it's just been shaken.”

Her face is radioactive orange, makeup paved on, hair napalmed with bleach, figure like an aging swimsuit model. She's carrying a shot glass-sized yogurt cup in one hand, and she sits down in a chair at the bedside. When she leans over Wicked College John, I can see a tribal-type tattoo on the slice of skin on her back, between her Aerosmith T-shirt and her pre-faded, pretty-much painted-on jeans.

“I brought KFC, sweetie,” she whispers into Wicked College John's ear. She waves a magazine with Carmen Electra on the cover in his face, then drops it on his thigh.

“No luck?” Toby says for no reason.

“The red freckles, those bumps on his face is a rash, it's some irritation thing from either the Compleat or the tube itself,” his mom says. “I told the doctor and food services: This family can't have food with high concentrations of nickel.”

“Dishydrosis,” Lip Cheese says. “That's why I shouldn't have the fries at Applebee's. But I cheat all the time.”

She crosses her legs habitually. “I told the cafeteria, I know your salads are pre-made,” she says. “But is it rocket science to
pick the almonds out? I told them: No nickel. The inside of my mouth: There are these bumps. But do these f—ing f—gners care?” she mouths the two words.

Lip Cheese's pupils spread, hypnotized by John's stomach rising and falling under a baby blue blanket. And, when the information makes its way into my brain that he is actually, one hundred percent, in a coma, I kind of say to myself: “Huh.” Then I find myself thinking about how I'm starting to feel something (which is progress, maybe?), like “Huh,” plus one.

“Listen, ma'am,” Toby says, posture spring-tensioned. “We're here to extend our sympathies, and, in addition, to …”

“He's not dead yet,” Wicked College John's mom says, touching Toby's arm, then jerking her hand back and squeezing some hand sanitizer into her palm. “Sorry, I'm very sensitive toward—sorry. They do jaundice phototherapy one floor down. Those babies—it's creepy.”

“We understand this might be hard to take,” Toby says. “But it's possible there was a domestic attack.”

Wicked College John's mom brushes something off her shirt, looks into her lap, and shakes her head: “Don't tell me this, don't tell me this, don't tell me this.”

Necro, this whole time, leans against the doorjamb, looking out the window at the ventilation shafts on the roof of the neighboring building. He hasn't said a word so far today. I look at him—to a) see if he'll make eye contact, and b) to therefore see whether he's mad at me about what I said to him after he went Tadahito Murakami: Ninja Surgeon on
Wicked College John, and if he's mad at me because I didn't help him with said surgeoning.

On the walk through the cold back to the car, Necro at least lets me bum a cigarette off him, but he just hands me the pack, without saying, “Sure!” or “Take and be my guest.” Wind spreads Lip Cheese's hair like a helicopter hovering over a field, and Toby removes his suit jacket, untucks his dress shirt, and squints into the sunlight.

“Buildings don't just explode,” Toby says, unlocking his car. There's red all around his eyelids; he keeps taking deep breaths; his lips look way fatter. “They even said they were skirting the authorities. They even said some community organization informed the police about them. Coincidences don't just happen side by side.”

Necro, who shrugs.

“You know who did this, I'll tell you. Ask me who it is.” Toby says, as if, suddenly, it's the end of the Clue game, and rain is slobbering down the windows, and the lightning is making the room only black and white. He inhales, the camera narrows in, the violins drop your heart off a cliff.

But then he hesitates, exhales slowly, and says, like maybe he can't think of anyone:

“Luckytown Hastings.”

“Fucky-Sucky-town Hastings,” Necro says.

“Luckytown Hastings?” I go.

“Wait. What are you talking about?” Lip Cheese says.

Lip Cheese has a point. Maybe it's actually very, very weird that Toby would bring up Officer Luckytown Hastings, once our Private Enemy No. 1, with parted hair that's so
neat it looks like it snaps on. Because, we haven't Rioted on Luckytown Hastings in at least six years. Here he was, in a picture from the
Democrat and Chronicle
, bricks of cocaine on a table, all scrubbed-clean looks, except for his right eye, which has a tiny black dot, a mini-pupil, just below his main pupil, like a moon orbiting a planet. Make a joke about the eye, you'd be carrying your legs home.