The War Against the Assholes Page 11

  Everyone wants to confess. Everyone secretly believes it will do him good. It doesn’t. Hob still looked ill after speaking: bloodless, eyes wild and glistening. “It was pretty funny though,” I said, “the whole scene back there. I’m here to claim my destiny and all that. You actually didn’t do so badly, man. You have unexpected fighting skills.” “Don’t touch that, you insect,” said Alabama, “comedy gold.” Our words did not have the intended effect on Hob. To cheer him up. Show him the lighter side of physical violence. He went paler. Greener-grayer. We had no vomit bucket. I didn’t want to have to mop up. So I quieted down. “Rest up,” said Alabama, “we’ll talk about this when Charthouse gets back. He can ask the man downstairs. He’ll know what to do.” Hob was already yawning. Didn’t puke. His color returned. He fell asleep in, literally, thirty seconds. On the couch. His head wrapped up in that kerchief. “That guy ordinarily can’t keep his mouth shut,” murmured Alabama.

  Still furious. Albeit less so. She lit up. Blue smoke. She slipped her gun out of her waistband and put it on a metal library shelf screwed into the back wall, next to her violin case. Hob snored. “Are you going to tell Charthouse,” I said. “I haven’t decided,” said Alabama. “So how bad is this,” I said. “We’re going to find out, I wager,” said Alabama. “There was something I wanted to ask him,” I said. “Well, A, he’s asleep, and B, if you think about it you’ll never remember,” said Alabama, “so just let it go.” “Man, everybody’s got secrets,” I said, “everybody’s ashamed of their lives.” As though I’d just realized. Even when you’re complete-seeming as Hob. She snorted. “If you’re going to be ashamed, don’t do whatever it is, and if you’ve done it, don’t be ashamed of it,” said Alabama. “That’s kind of amazing,” I said. I knew it would cause only problems. I said it anyway. Another example of when you have to speak up. “Are you trying to flatter me,” said Alabama. She took down her violin case. She clicked open its silver locks. “I was trying to compliment you,” I said, “or not even you but your philosophy.” “You’re very bad at it,” said Alabama. “I am bad at many things,” I said. Alabama went silent. Thinking, maybe, about how to phrase what she planned to say without offending me. Or how to achieve the sole purpose of offending me. “It’s not a universal,” she said. “What do you mean,” I said, “it’s not you just decide and that’s it. You don’t even get to decide. You have to find what you’re good at. It’s not up to you.”

  Like Hob, she said: concealment and deception, illusion and theatrics. Like Vincent, she said: a knack for living things, plants, animals. “He’s good with dogs. Cats. He won’t touch the crows, though. They freak him out way more than they do even Hob.” Alabama stroked her bow with a cake of amber rosin. “And what am I good at,” I said. “I don’t know, but even if I did I wouldn’t tell you. You have to determine,” she said. “That’s okay with me,” I said. “Why do you keep saying that,” said Alabama. The dark spot under her pale chin flashed at me as she swept the violin into place. “It’s from a movie, I think,” I said. Never doubt, writes Erzmund. Doubt is the sign of the amateur. It vouchsafes his eternal secondary standing. We have nothing to do with doubt, as we have nothing to do with pride—or any other moral affectation. “And what about Charthouse,” I asked. “He can do precise stuff,” said Alabama, “but the big stuff is thunder and lightning. You wouldn’t believe it.” Bow to strings. The music started. “And what about you,” I said. “Take a guess,” she said.

  14

  The rest of break: less remarkable. Christmas came and went. As did my grandmother. My father’s mother. My mother’s parents died the year I was born. My father did not hide the liquor. My grandmother got slurring drunk and started to denounce at the end of the meal blacks and Hispanics. A tradition, with her. We all sat in frozen silence around the goose. Its skin rich looking, almost red. “I’m not saying anything that isn’t backed up by the facts of the matter,” said my grandmother. “Spirit of the season,” said my father. “Tommy, you can debate all you like but just look what happened to the street you grew up on,” she said. “I think you’re exaggerating, Ma,” said my father. “I never once in my life have exaggerated,” said my grandmother. Not true. We all exaggerate and we all lie. It’s human nature. You can’t argue with your elders. No matter how incisive or brilliant your attack. They win by default. Simply by having survived longer than you. End of story. Her denunciations didn’t last long. “They’re all good people, just confused,” she said. She said this every year. She gave me a savings bond: fifty dollars. To mature when I was thirty-three. I kissed her slack cheek. My parents gave me a set of weights and told me I no longer had a curfew. I was stunned and touched. I assumed all my recent late nights would have made them assert their authority. People surprise you. They grant you more freedom than you’d expect. “Don’t make me regret this,” said my mother. “You know what your responsibilities are,” said my father, “so no buffoonery, please.”

  I did a lot of reading. By which I mean read and reread sections of the Calendar. I imagined Alfons Froch as Mr. Stone had described him, fleeing Hitler and Sebottendorf, sick with syphilis and poor, cold in the Berlin winter and ultimately victorious. If you die a free man, you win. No matter how sordid your death. I also learned THE FOUR WINDS, although I discovered Hob had cheated to perform one of the flourishes. I checked in with him every day, to see how he was carrying it. He sounded sick. I told him over and over Quinn was probably not dead. I had at that point inflicted serious physical harm on five people: Greg Gilder; the Barry brothers from Cardinal Corrigan, who jumped me after a football game; a kid at one of Simon Canary’s parties in ninth grade, whose name I to this day have never managed to learn; and Robert Gmielko. Gmielko groped me—he grabbed my cock in the showers when I was a freshman and he was a senior. I punched him in the throat, and then, when he’d collapsed, kicked him in the balls. He cried in front of me, from the pain. I nurture a dim hope that he in his post–high school years managed to avoid a criminal sexual conviction. The kid at Simon Canary’s party I coldcocked for looking at me funny. The Barry brothers: Desmond suffered a dislocated right shoulder and James a dislocated left. Gilder I’ve explained. You have to have gone through it. Otherwise it seems wrong. When in fact it’s merely another form of human expression. Or so I’ve decided. At the time I did not think about it at all. Merely acted. I did a lot of running, too, when I wasn’t talking to Hob. Coach Madigan recommended it when we didn’t have practice. To stay lean and mean: his words. I would have done it anyway. I love running. I like walking but I love running. Point A to point B. As fast as possible. With no reason.

  Crows followed me. At first I didn’t want to admit it. They’d glide from tree to tree in the park. They’d be hopping around ahead of me on the path and would only take flight when I got near them, ignoring the other runners. They perched on the points of the iron fence around the reservoir. Croaking their glad, hoarse croaks. If they were going to watch me, there was nothing I could do about it. An obnoxious one I tried and failed to kill. It was early in the morning, six or seven. I’d been running since dawn, when having to urinate woke me. I was gasping and footsore. This crow followed me for the duration of my run, treetop to treetop, bench to dry water fountain. Now, as I caught my breath, it perched on a branch and looked at me and laughed. Dry and raucous. “Too far, pal,” I said as I checked the path: no one. No other joggers, no park service employees in their leaf-emblemed golf carts, no cops, nothing. So I cleared my mind and stared at the crow. It stared back. “Turn to stone,” I said. My teeth locked. The words came out choked and sibilant. The crow did not turn to stone. Its feathers turned ash gray. From the talons up. Meager haunches, breast, wings, and glossy head and eyes: all went gray. When the transformation reached the top of its head, it leaped from the branch and winged off. Harder to spot than before, in fact, against the stony winter sky. Laughing its raucous laugh. My nose bled, a dense trickle. I wiped it away with my wrist. “Can’t fight city hall
,” I murmured.

  Failure. Failure at minor things. I got the cigarette-lighting man­euver down. Modern technology had rendered the exercise obsolete. Or hyper-refined Stone Age technology. Depending on how you look at it. No card impossibilities. No mirrors. I didn’t want to risk another fiasco. Even the niggling, useless things I did caused pain. Cigarettes. Making a pencil change from yellow to bright green. I got more nosebleeds. My lungs and spine ached. Once I suffered a crippling bout of diarrhea. From trying to fly, as I had done at the construction site. The valley of bones. Nothing dramatic. Just straining to levitate from the floor of my room. Two inches. Three. A foot at my peak. Then total collapse. A run to the bathroom. My father knocked, I was in there so long. If you desire struggle, you’ll struggle. If you worry, you will suffer. If you act, you conquer. The motto of an adolescent. Football inflicted worse pain. Football had no benefits I could discern, other than raising my various physical thresholds. Hob, short and frail: I wondered what it cost him. He masked it. My ache had gone underground: bones, the nerves behind my eyes. I was not sick. I was not tired. I needed less sleep. I had vivid dreams I could not recall on waking. I half-remembered having them before. Unknown stars and trees, unknown scent of unknown grasses. A woman’s face. A scar. A crow. I ate with twice as much vigor as usual. I consumed in one sitting five or six leftover pounds of Christmas goose. My mother asked where it had gone. “I wish sometimes we’d had a girl,” she said when I told her, stroking her forehead and arranging her hair, and pushing her glasses back onto the bridge of her nose. The expert’s art requires silence, concentration—and gratitude. That’s Erzmund also, from the prefatory remarks to his explanation of bottom dealing.

  So I won’t call it suffering. Yet the pain never left me. I woke early every day of Christmas break. Open-eyed and ready. Mornings I ran, late mornings I read, in the afternoons I practiced with cards and after that with no instrument other than my will. I would go for long walks at night. Terminating at Karasarkissian’s. Or east to the frigid esplanade. Hob joined me. Vincent once, Alabama more than once. We avoided talking about Quinn Klayman. Crows followed us. We let them live. None displayed the same presumption the crow in the park had. When I told Alabama and Hob about this, they both applauded the idea. Even though I’d failed. “Seriously, they need to like have a bird Holocaust,” said Hob. His ear had healed. A faint, thumb-shaped scar decorated the formerly torn flesh. You would never imagine that a future van rapist had torn a sail-shaped chunk from the cartilage and skin with his teeth. Alabama, however, did not joke about it. So I also refrained. The scar Vincent refused to eradicate. “You need a reminder,” he said, according to Hob, who had finessed him. Kept the important events of the night to himself. Told him he’d gotten into a fight. Told him Quinn had bitten him in a drug-induced frenzy. The words he used: drug-induced frenzy. A newscaster phrase.

  Alabama kept the wand. We studied it thoroughly one night, in the basement. When Vincent was out at another appointment. Hob couldn’t clarify what these were. The wand smooth and black. Carved from a single piece of wood: no seams, and you could detect the grain. “I’ve never seen one this close before,” said Hob. “It looks kind of shitty, to be honest,” I said. “Typically useful analysis,” said Alabama. She pointed it at the wall and closed her eyes. “Anything,” she said after several seconds. “Nothing,” said Hob. “Maybe it’s keyed to the owner,” I said. “Now, that actually sounds possible,” said Alabama. Cold and heavy. The wand, I mean. “So they all get issued these,” I asked. “I have no idea,” said Hob, “maybe. I’m not exactly an expert, remember?” “We could show it to Charthouse. I bet he knows,” I said. I realized how stupid this idea was before I’d finished forming the last word of my sentence. Alabama didn’t respond. Hob aimed the wand at one of the whiskey carboys. The eels went apeshit. Shooting around in the amber liquid. Spiraling, writhing. Alabama took the wand and examined it again. “No point in being delicate,” she said. Broke it between her slim, hard-looking hands.

  I was expecting green sparks. Pyrotechnics. Nothing. Just a dull snap. Just a dead dowel of black-brown wood. The eels calmed down. “I know you think it’s wrong,” I said, “to use it to get by.” “She’s a purist, though. It’s not wrong,” said Hob, “wrong’s the wrong word.” “If you want to lie about everything that matters,” said Alabama, “to yourself above all, that’s on you.” She was still holding Quinn’s broken wand. One half in either hand. “Would you,” she said, “do the honors?” Hob took the halves. Said: “Abracadabra, bitches.” Each jagged end lit up. Blazing white jets. Summer sparklers. The heat bent the air around his face. “Sterling,” I said. And I saw it in his eyes: the bone-deep, persistent, dizzying pain.

  15

  Are you awake, Mr. Wood,” said Sister Immaculata, “or are you dreaming?” I’d half-heard her question. She was asking the class about the origins of German nationalism. They’re assholes, I almost said, that’s the origin of their nationalism. I’d been toying with the pictures in my textbook: making the stiff generals and adjutants in the overdone paintings dance and wave their swords. They smiled louchely up at me. One of them waggled a gray mustache and winked. My head ached. My nostrils hurt. I did not mind. “Sorry, sister,” I said instead. I meant it.

  And then I shouted a single, stupid syllable. No form or meaning. When I lifted my eyes to apologize, when I raised them from the slowing images in my textbook, I saw sitting on the windowsill a woman dressed in a black business suit and a white shirt. She placed her right index finger athwart her purplish lips: the gesture for silence. A broad, forking, pork-hued scar crossed her white throat. Her hair snow colored. Her eyebrows snow colored. Her irises crimson. On her shoulder a massive raven. Settling its wings and clacking its beak. “Mr. Wood, please control yourself,” said Sister Immaculata. Hob glanced at me and wagged his head at the white woman. At least it was not an episode of insanity. The white woman grinned and slid fluently down to the floor. The knife points of her heels made two discrete clicks.

  “Since Mr. Wood has proven so incapable of answering what seems to me a very simple question,” said Sister Immaculata, “perhaps someone else would like to hazard a guess about the origins of German nationalism. Mr. Canary.” The raven shifted its wings. Obsidian: shanks, talons, beak, eyes. Two broad and irregular bracelets surrounded the white woman’s wrists. “Mr. Gilder.” Extruded, cancerous rings of iron. They rustled against her sleeves as she walked between the columns of desks. Pressing her palms together and parting her lips. “Mr. Malinowski.” She was strutting. No other word for it. This dead-white woman clad in black. A hip-shot stride. Past Simon Canary, who was digging in his left ear with his pinky, past Gilder and Wilton Opuwei and Matt Malinowski, who had a glass eye he used to remove and drop in girls’ drinks at parties. None of them noticed this woman. She was still grinning as she reached me. Her black heels clicking against the broad, lacquered planks of the floor. I wanted to leap backward. I wanted to run. But I did not want to look any more insane. So I locked my molars and tensed my thighs. Posture of courage, no? Hob stared. His mouth half-gaping. The white woman bent toward me. Lips parted. Half-smiling. Her teeth flawless and her tongue vibrant pink. She was going to kiss me. I didn’t flinch. I closed my eyes. The raven shifted again. Whicker of its feathers. Her hair grazed mine. Her breath brushed my cheek and ear. Frigid. Wet slate. One finger stroked the line of my jawbone and lifted my chin. When I opened my eyes the white woman was no longer standing there. Sister Immaculata continued to drone.

  “That was unexpected,” Hob said during lunch. We were sitting on the steps of Old Egypt. Smell of sweat and ozone. “Yes,” I said. “Do you think it’s like retribution,” Hob said. “I literally have no idea how the rules work on this,” I said. “Well,” said Hob, “if they’re going to get back at us, at least they sent someone you think is hot, right? Being an older lady and all.” “Fuck you,” I said. “It’s not a crime to like someone who doesn’t reciprocate, Micha
el,” Hob said. “Except it basically is,” I said, “not that I grant your first point.” “You have a unique moral system,” said Hob. The white woman’s cold, firm fingers against my chin. The odd scent of her breath. I kept recalling them. I had a massive hard-on. Fear can do that, they say. Or shock. Or the presence of death. Luckily, I was seated. I don’t think Hob noticed. “And she even had that crow,” he said.

  “It was a raven,” I said, “yes it’s a corvid, it’s the same family, but the big ones are ravens, the medium ones are crows, and the little ones are daws.” More expertise I garnered from my parents’ nature-show addiction. “Did she kiss you,” Hob said. “Came close,” I said, “sort of presumptuous.” “I didn’t know you were such an expert, anyway,” said Hob, “in bird taxonomy.” He scrambled up. I waved good-bye. My cock was still stone-hard and I did not want to stand up. I had a fetish for menacing, raven-owning women. Psychological news to me. She wasn’t bad-looking. Just odd. That white hair and that scar across her larynx. “I hope you’ll agree,” said Hob, “no matter what comes next, that Quinn deserved it.” “Should we run,” I said. “Not much point,” said Hob, “seems like.” I had to agree. The white woman had just waltzed in. He caressed his healed ear. “It was hurting this morning,” he said, “I wonder if it’s now like a bum knee before it rains.” “You’re not an old geezer,” I said, “don’t worry so much about your bodily ills.”