subliterature

Seems wishful thinking, but I’ll try it this one time. Since nearly all the words are set now, all that’s left is the telling. Your eyes have told me you wouldn’t be shocked by anything. Your hands tell me you would have killed him yourself. Your voice has always calmed me, even when you talked of the grenade in your foxhole. As I write this, I can almost hear you. You do what you have to, honey. What can I say? And now the telling’s almost over. Just a few more words, then a few more days, and maybe I’ll be free of it. Once the thing is released to a perpetuity of endless words and endless quiet. My own bit of forgotten, irrelevant subliterature. Made even smaller, even more forgettable, once hacked to pieces and scattered. Not dust yet, but closer to it. Will it blow away into nothing? Or piece itself into meaningful existence? I will leave that to you—you and your knack for stories. Because this is the only telling this one will ever get from me.

50

I downed my drink as I read the cit a few more times. This cit had a satisfying finality to it—and its number, 50, was the highest I’d seen so far on any of them. But it reminded me of a question that Mona and I had never quite answered: Why Red? Why was she narrating to Red?

I had an idea. I stood up quickly and felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. A day’s worth of slow alcohol intake will do that. But after splashing some water on my face, I felt almost good enough to drive.

“Billy!” Mr. Phillips said, opening his door. “Why aren’t you at work? They let you out early? You look a little ragged.”

“I’m supposed to be attending to personal matters today. Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”

“Well, come on in. I’d suggest going out for coffee, but I’m afraid someone might see us.”

“I just wanted to show you some stuff,” I said.

He turned off his radio and led me to a brown plaid couch with sunken cushions. The couch was piled with a bunch of newspapers and magazines, which he swept onto the floor with a single sweep of his skinny arm.

“You want a cup of tea or something?”

“I’m okay, thanks.” As he sat beside me, I handed him the articles about Derek Brownlow.

He put on his glasses and read the first. Wordlessly, he flipped to the second.

“I’ll be damned,” he muttered in the middle of it.

When he put them down, he shook his head. “I don’t know if I believe it,” he said. “I don’t know if she had it in her.”

I handed him some of the newer cits, the more revealing ones. He took them but didn’t even look at them.

“Do you remember this Glass Girl thing?”

“Yes. Now that you show me those articles. But I never made the connection with the cits. It’s been a long time. It was one of those fifteen-minute kinds of things, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Are you sure you’re all right? You look like you could use a glass of water.”

“Maybe. I’ll get it,” I said, getting up slowly. I got him one too. As I watched him sipping, I tried to decide if this apartment depressed me. The ancient plaid couch smelled like hot dogs. The radio was probably older than me. Much of his furniture was covered with newspapers and scattered bits of paper, many of which looked to be handwritten cits. But Mr. Phillips himself was sunny enough.

I put down my glass and handed him “subliterature.”

“That’s addressed to you, I think,” I said. “Like the rest of them.”

“Probably,” Mr. Phillips admitted.

I didn’t say anything.

“I’d like to think I’d have said a little more than that. A little more than”—he looked at the cit again—“‘You do what you have to, honey.’ It’s sad to read that.”

“Why did she want to tell you this story?”

“Sounds like it was a story she really needed to tell.”

“Well, that’s not enough! Why didn’t she tell her boyfriend, then? Why not tell Scout? Or a sympathetic lady friend, like Grace?”

“I’m an extremely sympathetic fellow, Billy. The ladies have always recognized that.”

“But why you? You must’ve known her better than you’ve been admitting.”

“Maybe it was never really me she was telling.” Mr. Phillips frowned. “Except perhaps in her head. Ever think of that?”

“How well did you know her?”

“I trained her, just like Dan trained you. I told her war stories at lunch on the stoop. I’ve already told you that. I never saw her outside the Samuelson office. I don’t even know where she was from, or where she lived when she worked there.”

“But you knew enough to say you thought she didn’t have it in her,” I pointed out.

“Appearances. That was based on appearances.”

I raised my eyebrows at him, and his face grew red.

“I’ve shot a few men dead in my life, you know that?” he barked at me.

“No. I’m sorry.” I slumped back onto the sour brown cushions.

“But I still don’t know if I could’ve stabbed a guy in the jugular under any circumstance. Excuse me if I have trouble believing that sweet, quiet gal could’ve done it, either.”

I stood up impulsively.

“Tell me the truth,” I began. I was dizzy from the head rush, but talked through it. “Did you know what happened to her? Did you know? Did you know the newspapers were writing about someone you saw every day? That the police thought she was a killer?”

“Sit down,” he said, out of the side of his mouth. “Quit the dramatics. No, I didn’t know. If I had known, this little cit chase of ours would’ve been an incredible bore.”

I sank back into the couch.

“You’re being a little insensitive, Homer. You’re forgetting that I’m closer to this story than you. Don’t you think I’m wondering the same things? I can just see her sitting there on the steps. I didn’t know her well, but I remember her. And when I see her there, and I read what she was trying to say … I just wonder.” Mr. Phillips shook his head. “I wonder if there was something I was supposed to do, or supposed to see. I can’t do anything now. Mary Anne’s probably out there somewhere, and I hope she’s well. But that girl on the step. She’s gone. And there’s nothing I can do for her.”

“Probably—” I yawned. “Probably there was nothing you were supposed to do.”

“Not sure about that, Homer.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, leaning into the side of the couch. “I’m a little out of it. I’ve been drinking all day.”

“That’s a good one, Billy. All-American boy-boozer.” He laughed and said something else, but I didn’t hear it clearly. His voice faded away from me as my eyes closed.

When I woke up, I heard a newspaper rustling. Across from me, Mr. Phillips lowered his Wall Street Journal.

“Finally,” he said.

I looked at the couch cushion beside me. Mr. Phillips had left my cits and articles there in a neat little pile.

“There’s a few new ones in there for you,” he said. “I don’t know if it matters, at this point. But there are a few more ’53 cits. I meant to give them to you the day of the Christmas party.”

I glanced out the window. It was dark.

“Damn it,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Because you were annoying the hell out of me before you passed out. Seemed best to let you sleep it off.”

I sighed. “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened.”

“Maybe you oughta go home and get into bed. Do you want me to call you a cab?”

“No, I’m all right. What time is it?”

“Just about eight.”

As I began to gather my cits, Mr. Phillips said, “Hey, Billy. Dan tells me you’re quite the joker.”

“Oh, no,” I said, blushing at the memory of the hol-landaise joke. “That would be an exaggeration.”

“Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?” Mr. Phillips asked.

“No, I don’t believe I did.”

“He worked it out with a pencil.”

“Wonderful. That is truly a new one for me.”

“But you’re not laughing,” Mr. Phillips said.

He’d already picked up his paper again and was grimacing at something in the Marketplace section. I wondered how, at his age, one comes to decide what to care about. It dawned on me that even fifteen years ago, when Mary Anne knew him, he was already old.

“She wanted to know how you come back from a war,” I said.

“You think so, do you?” Mr. Phillips barely looked up from his paper.

“Yeah. That’s why you. That’s why you and not Dan.”

Mr. Phillips harrumphed, but put down his paper. His face puckered in thought.

“How do you come back from a war?” I asked.

“There’s no how in it,” he said. “You just do. Because you have to. Because what’s the alternative, after all?”

I watched him shift in his chair.

“You know, I was thinking about it while you were sleeping,” he continued. “I think the problem we’re having here is generational. Your generation thinks everything can be worked out if you talk about it enough. Your generation is always looking for answers to all the little questions and never bothering with the big ones. You young folks know nothing about real history. But you love to talk about your own little pasts. Ad nauseam.”

“I’ll have to work on that,” I said.

“It’s not your fault. It’s the baby boomers that started it. You don’t know any better.”

“I’m not sure about that.”

A light snow was falling when I came out of Mr. Phillips’s place. I let the defroster run for a minute and scanned across the Collins Hill complex. Mr. Phillips’s was the second apartment out of about eight in his section of the village. Only two other apartments had their lights on. The line of numbered doors reminded me of a motor lodge. I wondered if the clean, efficient anonymity of the place was comforting to its residents. That manufactured sensation of being on your way someplace else. I pulled out of the driveway and headed in the direction of my apartment.

He worked it out with a pencil. Mr. Phillips’s punch line came to me suddenly. Laughter rolled up into my chest as I sped down the road. My shoulders shook as I leaned into the steering wheel.

Red light. I stomped on the brake. Everything whirled. I yanked the wheel to the right. When the car stopped spinning, I was right in the middle of the intersection. The road was empty. I’d gotten lucky. If anyone had come through the perpendicular street, I’d have slammed right into them. And here I still was, with my car’s nose pointed toward the sidewalk. I sat silent, heart pounding, playing chicken with nobody in particular. I wasn’t quite ready to move my old Pontiac from this fated spot. How undignified it would’ve been to die here. And with the dirty secret of my death forever mine alone—that it was a constipated mathematician who had sealed my fate.

Still I didn’t move. Because this wasn’t about a tasteless joke. It was about fate. It was December 28, five years out, and I was in the middle of an intersection. In the wrong lane, facing the wrong way. The street was deserted but there was still some danger in it—someone could speed into this intersection at any moment. The light gave my hood a red glow, but everything else on this corner was a holy gray, lit by the subdued streetlamps and nothing else. The Sunoco station two blocks up looked very distant. I kept my foot on the brake. The light above me turned green. It didn’t matter. I was so turned around, I didn’t know which light was mine. My hands stayed locked on the wheel, and my foot on the brake. This was what I’d been looking for all day. This was where I was supposed to be. Where I could remember how dangerous my life really was. Where no one could tell me otherwise, and nothing could distract me from it.

What had today meant? Shuffling citations. Primly sipping cocktails. Snoring like a drunk on an old man’s couch. When had my life become such a gentle disgrace? Days in a cubicle, summarizing every concept known to humanity in the blandest possible terms. Nights trying to forge a path through darkness with lightbulb jokes. For this I had fought and survived?

I hit the gas and accelerated up to the Sunoco station. It wasn’t until I was parked next to the gas pump that I realized how badly I was shaking. I turned the car off. I didn’t need gas, I just needed to decide what should come next. Drive west? Drive to my apartment? Drive to Mona’s and hope for the sort of drop-in love that happens only in movies? I stared into the gas station, where a bearded attendant was stacking cups by a coffee machine. I waited for him to turn around and see me, but it never happened. He finished his work, balled up the plastic bag in his hands, and then disappeared into the back of the store.

Once he was out of sight, I released the breath I’d been holding. Then I rummaged through the tapes on my passenger side and stuck my old traveling music into the tape player. The Allman Brothers. I started the car again. As I approached my house, “Midnight Rider” was still going. I couldn’t bring myself to stop the car in the middle of this song. So I kept driving.

I gunned it past the endless two-family houses, the Salvation Army store, the China Buffet. The end of the song dumped me at the light next to Discount Liquors, which appeared to be open. I turned in and parked in their enormous lot. Half of the population of Claxton could get a hankering for a cocktail on the same night, and there would still be ample parking for all.

Funny I should end up here tonight. Had the constipated mathematician and the Allman Brothers brought me here, or was I headed here the whole time? This was how I’d spent my one-year mark, four years ago. That had been the most significant one. I’d spent a year biting my nails, waiting for the cancer to get me again. Each time I went in for another gallium scan and chest X-ray, I fully expected bad news and never quite believed the good news that always came. I lived like a monk my first semester, burying myself in philosophy as if it were my last chance to understand anything before my body took me hostage again. When it dawned on me that a year had really passed without another sign of the sickness, I was stunned.

On the official one-year mark—December 28—I didn’t know if I was relieved or angry. I’d felt I should mark the occasion in some momentous way. Since I was home for the holidays at the time, I couldn’t come up with anything much more exciting than sneaking off to a bar in the town next door. My parents were asleep when I got home, but my sister was up, reading on the living room couch. When I told her why I’d been out celebrating, she’d considered me for a moment, then said, “I’m really happy for you. I know what a tough year it’s been for you. If you’d said something about what day it was, we could’ve all done something together.”

When I didn’t manage much of a response, she continued.

“I kinda wonder, though. Of all the things you could be today, why you chose drunk.”

I probably could have called her on her faux-professorial tone, which she’d perfected over the course of the year I’d been sick. Or woken everyone up screaming about how little she understood. But instead I just laughed and staggered to my bedroom to sleep it off.

In fact, there was an answer to her question—Why drunk? What my sister didn’t know was that I’d actually been a teetotaler the whole first year after the treatments. The reason for this was simple. As a veteran of some serious high school ragers, I associated drinking with nausea. And nausea was one thing I didn’t need any more of. But when I contemplated how I’d celebrate my first-year anniversary, I found that I was curious about trying alcohol again. While it might have seemed pathetic to my sister, there was a certain euphoria in reclaiming the simple pleasure of a few stiff drinks. And it had felt like a very special occasion.

Inside Discount Liquors, I wandered the wide, endless white aisles of hooch and tried to decide what I wanted. Failing that, I decided to get everything. I put a new bottle of gin in the cart, along with lime juice, a six-pack of Black Label, rum, two liters of Coke, and an experimental bottle of pear schnapps, which I’d heard was pretty good. If the first year was euphoric, the fifth was going to be a revelation.

No one seemed impressed or alarmed by my purchases. In a liquor store, my selections probably seemed about right for a young man of legal age preparing for a small party at his pad. Besides, the woman behind me in line was buying four bottles of Absolut Citron and two of Southern Comfort. Her story was probably far more troubling than mine.

On my way out of the store, something on the sliding glass door caught my eye. It was a large sticker that they’d used to decorate the glass. “Celebrate Life!” it said, in sparkly silver letters. The edges of the sticker were peeling and brown. The very top of the exclamation point had been pulled off, and the “C” was curling in on itself.

I laughed, standing with my blue plastic Discount Liquors cart poised in front of the open glass doors. Celebrate life! I intended to. But what did that really mean? And how many of us actually know how to go about it? I stood there puzzling over my own attempts, past and present, until the SoCo and Citron lady came up behind me with her cart. She wanted to get by. I pushed my cart through the doors and we were both on our way.