“I told Justin we were rolling his house sometime this week,” Rachel said. “He said he had a paintball gun and would hide in the bushes. He was being all serious for some reason.” She laughed. “He was like, ‘Do it, if you have to,’ all serious-like.”
“Excellent,” Steve said. “We’ll do his house after. His home.”
Greg had the thought that “Justin” was codename for “Greg”—for himself. That they were going to roll his place next. And he’d do it too, he knew, he’d roll his own apartment — like some convoluted, surreal attempt at allegory — and to avoid embarrassment he’d pretend vehemently that he didn’t know it was his own apartment; he’d change his identity if he had to — lawfully, with forms, a fifty-dollar processing fee.
They came to a cul-de-sac. Two other cars were parked in the street.
Steve parked, got out.
“Whose car?” someone asked Steve.
“Mine,” Steve said. “I carjacked it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Greg’s.” Steve pointed at the car.
“Who’s ‘Greg’?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. He laughed. “Some guy. He had TB.”
“It’s so early,” someone else was saying. “It’s barely even dark out.” His voice took on a mock-authoritative tone. “We are becoming too confident, we rowdy teenagers, we, um, fucking.…”
In the car, Greg and Rachel were still and silent until Rachel twisted abruptly around and looked at Greg, her eyes wide and white and steady. “Do you really like rolling? Do you like it a lot?” She wasn’t smiling, but looked actually a little bored. But then she was grinning and looked giddy.
Greg scratched his neck. “I guess,” he said. His voice came out little, then gone, like a leprechaun. He began to look around. There was a sudden erratic gravity to his eyes; there were people in there — little people, with little rocket packs.
“Do you like Steve?”
“I don’t know,” Greg said. He looked down at his hands, which he moved toward one another, then touched, and held, like gimp lovers. His thumbs were closest to him. He thought of twiddling them.
“Do you like me?”
Something fat and sweaty entered Greg, did a crude little jig, and then vanished, leaving in its place a hotness, a plain and glowless burning; Greg was embarrassed for many different reasons that came all at once — the accidental mob of them crowding in, drunk and with pitchforks, demanding answers. “I don’t know,” Greg said. “No.” He meant to say yes, or something like that, but “No” was what came out, and it came out mean, and his face looked mean, too, like it always did.
Rachel grinned, but Greg didn’t see. He was looking down into the dark area where his shoes were. He felt as if in grade school, and he had a thought, that he wasn’t ready to like anyone yet, that he was far from it.
Someone called Rachel’s name and she exited the car. Greg sat a moment, thought about things, then got out too, feeling like a wasteland of things gone wrong, an entire country of wrongness. He couldn’t see Rachel again — he wouldn’t — not her or anyone she knew. He would have to quit at the library, maybe move to another county or state. He went to the trunk of his car and tore open a 24-pack of toilet paper, took a roll, and threw it madly, almost horizontally, into a tree. It went clear through, and then over a fence. Greg got another roll. Someone laughed and told Greg that it was the wrong house. Besides Greg, there were about a dozen teenagers. They took their rolls, dashed a few houses down to Ali’s house, and started hurling them up. They wrapped individual flower plants and laid toilet paper carefully on the tops of hedges. One girl unfurled her roll, taut, from a tree in Ali’s yard to a mailbox across the street. A car came by. Everyone hid half-assedly behind bushes and trees. The car slowed a little, then accelerated and left. Rolling resumed. Someone said he didn’t think this was Ali’s house. They spread out, began rolling the houses on either side. Greg was in a side yard, where no one could see him. He threw his roll up into a tree, scrambled over the grass, and caught it on its way down; and for a moment felt that he knew again what it was to be a kid — to be four, five years old — but the feeling passed, went through him like a little dream, like a dream a baby rabbit would have. When they had no more toilet paper, they ran into the street and stood a moment to admire. Toilet paper curtained the houses, undulating and in layers, like something undersea and unlikely, and promising; stray sections of toilet paper stuck airily against branches and shingles, lay pat and torn and strewn over the yards and bushes; wrapped-up flower plants sat like little gifts on the grass, squat and cabbage-like, bandaged and decapitated as heads. In a different world, these houses would be celebrated. People would dance in the yards, sleep the night outside. In this world, there would be form-letter warnings from the neighborhood community association, and if the lawns were not cleaned by the next afternoon, calls would have to be made. Everyone ran wildly back into their cars, laughing and screaming things. Steve sat in the driver’s seat, Greg sat in back, and Rachel sat passenger. There was another kid, also, in back. He was smiling and looking at Greg and he said, “Who are you?”
Greg said his name, but in an unaccompanied sort of voice — a voice de-personed early-on, in the brain. The new kid kept looking at him. Greg wondered if he had answered, or just mouthed something, no sound coming out. His heart was beating fast. The question stayed in his head—who are you? “I’m Greg,” he said, but his voice seemed now so loud and melodramatic that he felt only Greglike, not truly Greg. He felt Greggy; and he felt dizzy and hollow and aloft, like an attic — a family of owls inside and hoo’ing, or else outside and flapping — mauling — at the roof. The new kid said, “You had TB!” and made a face. Greg felt that he was blushing hard and that Rachel was looking at him and he turned away, looked out his window. Down the road, someone was walking a dog, and above that was the low, thin, whiteblue moon — slit and off-color as something about to be sealed shut from the other side.
They drove off. Toilet paper caught against Greg’s window, rippled there like a flag, and then rushed off and away. All the strange and giant things began to float by, outside, in the night, and from another car, someone stuck their head out their window and screamed, “Faggot Ali!” Someone else screamed, “Muhammad Ali!” And someone else, “Muhammad Ali Baba! Ahhh! Ahhhhrrrrr!”
Sincerity
Once, while having sex with his girlfriend Alicia, the theme from Star Wars had gone into Aaron’s head and he had suddenly and loudly begun to hum it, which he could not, then, sustain, as he had started to laugh.
He laughed and laughed.
And things changed after that.
Sex became a precarious thing. Often, it could not happen. Songs or tunes, little ditties — tom-tom drum beats, kazoo-y cartoon music — would automatically go into both their heads. The required focus and grave seriousness of sex, that inner, outer-spacey concentration toward some black and scrappy source, some vague but findable piece of lust — it could not happen anymore. Only songs could happen. And there were other changes. Their quarrels — they had always fought — took on a tone of mocking and farce. Sometimes, now, fighting with Alicia, both of them yelling — shrieking at times, and crying, even, like babies! — something in Aaron would scald white and clean, like a flash pasteurization, and he would tickle her until she fell down giggling. Or he would just start laughing, then have to chase down and tickle her, to sort of convince her — delude her — of his otherwise unacceptable behavior. And Alicia, too, underwent change, having once, during a fight, opened a drawer and taken from it a glass of water — she had premeditated it! — and, after telling Aaron, sincerely, that he was an asshole, grinned and poured the water on his head.