“What if I told you I was saving up for a Claddagh ring?”
“I’ve
got
a Claddagh ring,” she said. “It goes nicely with my dad’s little pistol.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What do you mean,
What’s that supposed to mean?
His little pistol on the bar downstairs. You haven’t seen it? It really shoots, you know?”
“I doubt that,” I said. “Though it might explain a few things if it did.” (Though I wasn’t exactly sure what I meant by this comment, it was certainly received with every ounce of its incestuous implication, particularly when considering the delicate subject of our original abstinence.)
“I was
joking
!” she shouted, waving her fists so angrily that I was certain they’d slam against something before coming undone. “You think I’d really get work with a film like that! You don’t recognize a joke when you hear one!”
“I knew you were joking,” I said, still lying on my back, breathing in long, slow breaths, watching the moment play out from some other place.
“Jesus Christ, George.”
Forty-four
A few hours later, after what amounted to a long, touchless nap, I ended up squatting down in the bathtub to absorb myself in a reading assignment on the division of Iowegians who fought on the first day of the battle of Shiloh, nicknamed the Hornet’s Nest for the deafening whiz of bullets through the sapling and peach trees. I imagined the battle from a dozen angles, reliving six hours of onslaught along that sunken Tennessee road, when the Unionists never broke, even when the Confederate artillery lined up sixty-two cannon at point-blank range, the most ever used at that time in a war effort. All but wiped out, the Iowa boys held them off long enough for General Grant’s reinforcements to arrive by steamboat. Under a heavy rain and snowing peach blossoms, surrounded by more than twenty thousand American dead, Grant’s army pushed the Rebels back where they came from and changed the course of the war. The writing was battle ready and emotional. I guess you could say it worked on me because I hopped out of the bathtub full of pride, embracing the attitude that if I left our petty skirmish to brood unattended, it would only spread and threaten to destroy everything we’d so recently regained. But when I marched into the room, prepared to serenade Emily with all the poetic whispers of a quixotic knight-errant, I was immediately derailed by my wake-up call that sounded in four or five rings like furious cowbells that sent Emily’s knees and elbows leaping skyward as though yanked into action by a crude marionette puppeteer. She covered her ears and pinned her face into the mattress, her bloodless right hand soon slapping the empty side of the bed, in rhythm with the rings—a tin drummer rapping out a seismographic beat meant to probe the mattress, and the Days Inn motel, and the earth holding us up for proof of their immeasurable stupidity.
Forty-five
February brought record low temperatures and a sense of frozen time, intensified by such a layering of motion-restrictive clothing and the sudden lack of shame in the sporting of thermal face masks that I hardly recognized my fellow crew members except by the shouts of their profane invitations to the unforeseeable spring. Emily returned to the theater full force, pouring all her energies into the creative invention of a dramatic other, in this case an Irish gypsy who’d never known a moment’s rest from society’s glaring sidewise judgments. (I felt I was doing the same, molding myself to the character of spineless sap with infinite patience for guilt trips and stoned motel room digressions in nihilism, then absurdism; I would have lost her if I didn’t.) As for her parents, her dad continued traveling to meet with potential business partners and scout new store locations, while her mom joined a support group for parents of deceased children, then broke with her doubles partner in exchange for a punishing season of singles in a more competitive and younger division. Under other circumstances these actions might have been considered healthy, but that was never my impression, particularly in the case of Emily, who’d taken to such radical shifts of behavior that I was forced to interpret many of her unwelcomed commentaries as those of a character playing an actor, as opposed to the other way around. (Perhaps this was also the case in earlier moments of effrontery tracing as far back as our junior year on the day she summoned me from class in the spirit of a strict secretary, after presenting a notably less dominant personage when I first met her a few days before.)
At any rate, we continued meeting every Friday at the Days Inn, where one night I arrived key in hand to find her parading about naked while rearranging the furniture to enable more preposterous positions and deeper penetration. While testing such a position—which might have been more easily enjoyed minus the nightstand turned on its side and the desk chair stacked on the love seat—Emily ended up role-playing an enraged and poverty-stricken publisher, designating me the hermetic author of a science-fiction manuscript that for personal reasons I had refused to release.
“I
made
you!” she screamed. “You recluse! Prick tease! You hack!”
“You’re a leech! You’re all leeches!”
“Tell me the story!”
“No!”
“Tell me the title!”
“No!”
“Gimme the first page, you flaming, pissant, cocksucking
hobbit
!”
“On the first page
YOU GET FUCKED!
”
And so it went back and forth as I cranked her legs over my shoulders and she pounded the wall. Next she played a mail-order bride with rape fantasies, then a Christian missionary undergoing her own conversion in a Bible-thumping gang bang. Emily was still inventing new characters and asking me to help her prop one end of the bed up on the desk when I complained that I couldn’t keep up with the dialogues, admitting that anyway I’d squirted myself dry. We ended up smoking a bowl on the windowsill, where Emily told me all about the propaganda films she was studying.
“The best thing about them is that they’re all epics. You’ve got to see
Pulgasari
, which is this absurd Godzilla rip-off they made in North Korea. I mean, everything about it’s ludicrous, including the fact that the director was kidnapped from South Korea after he got fired from his studio. After watching it, I had this amazing dream where I was a cute little Asian girl who was actually a badass spy. Do you ever have dreams like that? Where you end up a character in the movie you just watched?”
“We’ve got pay-per-view right here,” I said, standing up to push the desk back against the wall. But Emily caught my arm and shook her head, knowing I’d sit right back down. “For all the movies you watch, we haven’t ordered a single one since we started coming here.”
“Next time,” she said, strumming her fingernails along the heating vent. “I promise. Anyway, my
Pulgasari
dream was so real, I remember thinking that being a spy is basically the same as being an actor, except without the audience. It’s perfect in so many ways. But anyway, there I was in North Korea, mingling with the enemy. So one day over tea my friend keeps staring at me, giving off a major impression that she’s figured out I’m not who I say I am.
You work for the Americans,
she finally tells me.
But I’m still not afraid because I know we can never be defeated. Under Kim Jong-il’s leadership, our resolve will never be silenced. You think you’ve learned our secrets, but you haven’t learned anything. We can even breathe underwater
.”
Emily laughed a heinous little laugh. I threw my arm over her shoulder and closed my eyes, like I’d had too long a day to stay awake another minute. But Emily pulled a hair from the top of my head, accusing me of professionally offending her by falling asleep during her performance. She lit a cigarette and shoved it in my mouth. I sat up again and leaned my cheek against the cold window, staring out over a thin stretch of woods toward the blinking lights on University.
“So is this friend a government official or something?”
“She’s just a regular old cadre,” Emily said. “But her husband works in a secret nuclear facility. He’s the real target.”
“All right,” I said. “So what happens next?”
“I decide to act like I’m actually a government agent hunting coun terrevolutionaries, not telling her as much, but hinting that I’m proud of her and that I hope she continues saying everything she’s supposed to say to pass my test.
Come on,
I tell her.
Nobody can breathe underwater.
But she just smiles and drinks her tea, like every time I open my mouth I’m just convincing her even more that I’m a spy.
We can,
she says.
It’s a routine element of our training. Since everyone does military service, everyone can do it.
I end up laughing, realizing that I’m trapped because I trust this woman, she’s my best friend actually, and now I really want to know how she learned to breathe underwater. So I play it like no one in my home village has ever heard of such training, which makes sense because we’re mountain people and we train differently. But my friend only gets angry, telling me she’s sick of my lies. She knocks her cup of tea onto the floor.
You’re too cocky, little sister. Think about it. H
2
O.
That’s two oxygen molecules for every one hydrogen. That’s enough to keep breathing.”
Emily paused for a moment, smirking as she flashed one finger, then two, then one finger, then two. “Go on,” I said.
“You’re thinking about it, right?”
“I’m thinking what you would look like in sandals and one of those r ice-paddy hats.”
“Good,” she said. “That’s the next scene. My friend insists on showing me how she can breathe underwater, which is great, except now I’m starting to realize that this is probably just a trick to take me down to the rice paddy and kill me. But of course I follow her anyway. I watch her wade into the knee-deep water. I do everything she asks me to do, even though I have no idea how this will turn out.
It’s all a matter of willpower, belief, mental toughness,
she says. She lies on her back so that only the tips of her feet are above water, completely submerging herself and gripping the rice stalks to keep from floating back up. Twenty seconds pass, then forty, a minute, a minute and a half. When her legs stop moving I get scared and grab her shirt, but as soon as I pull her up she kicks and slaps my arm away. Actually, that’s not what happened. She didn’t just slap my arm. She gave me a big okay sign, which I guess was a joke, since giving an okay is such an American thing to do. Anyway, a couple more minutes go by. The routine continues. I get worried again and try to pull her out, but she flashes me another okay and stays under. After about ten minutes she finally stands up. She’s covered in mud, which she wipes from her forehead and cheeks, but she’s not at all out of breath.
Are you ready to join us yet?
she asks me.
Are you ready to believe?
”
I laughed Emily’s heinous little laugh, which I thought would tidily wrap up the story. But Emily repeated her “Are you ready to believe?” line; this time her Asian accent dropped off and her voice rose just enough to let me know that she wasn’t acting anymore, that she was herself again and she was asking me a direct question. She took my cigarette and stole the last puff.
“It’s a good story,” I said, yawning. “Let’s go to bed, okay?”
“Do you think it would work? Do you think if I filled the bathtub that you could breathe underwater?”
“How could I even try without knowing the secret? Your friend never actually revealed
how
she breathed underwater.”
“I didn’t tell you the end of the dream,” she said. “I could tell you the secret if you feel like testing it?”
I pushed off the windowsill, walking around the disarrayed room, trying to decide where to start first. “Maybe it’s time for a new film series,” I said, throwing the comforter back on the bed. “I think all that propaganda is starting to work.”
“Of course it is. Propaganda works like magic. It’s probably the reason why I rented a room at the Days Inn instead of Best Western. Advertising and propaganda are basically the same thing. You can think you’re smarter than both of them, but once they get their jingles into your brain, repeating over and over, there’s not much you can do.”
I nodded along, deciding that the best way to get her to bed would be to limit my answers to nods and head shakes, to remain as quiet as possible while moving the furniture back. But as I was searching for my wallet, I was struck by the exact sort of jingle she was talking about and couldn’t hold back from singing it out.
“Don’t baste your barbecue, don’t baste your barbecue . . . it’s what you do when you barbecue . . . you gotta Maull it!”
“Exactly,” she said, returning the telephone to the nightstand, then switching it with the lamp on the other side. “Maull’s Barbecue Sauce. I wouldn’t baste my barbecue if my life depended on it. I Maull that shit every time.”
“You
gotta
Maull it,” I repeated, still considering her challenge to breathe underwater in the bathtub. I placed my hands over the heater, noticing all the lit billboards across the horizon with their familiar advertisements for gas station convenient stores, the latest fast-food inventions, winter clearances at malls and sporting goods stores.
“So Peyton’s dad wanted you in his shoe commercial, huh?” I watched Emily’s reflection in the window as she pushed a chair back under the desk. “Did you run into him at the mall or something? You never said anything about seeing him over the summer.”
“Oh
that
,” she said, sighing like I’d just ruined an interesting conversation. She pulled the chair out again and plopped down in it. “I can’t believe it took you this long to ask. I didn’t tell you about seeing him because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Has anyone ever told you that you’re sensitive, George? You’re really touchy sometimes.”
“You still haven’t told me,” I said, turning around. “What happened?”