“You should have been twenty minutes early,” Garret finally said. “You should have thought, ‘Hmm, I’ve been late so many times, maybe I should come much earlier this time, in case one of my excuses comes up to delay me.’ ”
“You should have been an hour early,”—once he started, he knew, he had to keep going; the anger came from nowhere, it came and was here—“sitting and waiting, to make up for all the hundreds of hours you’ve been late before, to compensate, to make sure.” The city lights overlapped in the air, became swimmy, blotchy, and brown. What was reasonable and what was required and what was just plain stupid? Should he apologize? All of life seemed just to be one thing — one slap-dash’ed, stuffed turkey of a thing, flying out of the oven and into the night, into orbit; something once familiar and under control, but now just out there, unknown, by itself, charred and brainless and rarely glimpsed.
“That’s it,” Kristy said. “I’m going to your place right now to get my stuff.”
They went back to Garret’s apartment. They walked the entire way. Across the avenues and over the Brooklyn bridge. She walked about 20 feet in front. He followed. The night was noisy and black, starless and warm. Maybe it was not winter at all, but summer.
At his apartment, Garret sat on his bed.
Kristy smashed her possessions into her piece of luggage. “You can keep these for your next girlfriend.” She held up two mud-green three-pound weights.
“Can you be quiet a little? My suitemate is probably trying to sleep,” Garret said. “Why are you so angry, anyway? You’re leaving me, so calm down.”
Kristy’s mouth began to bleed, a slow seeping at the edge, like an early sign of mutation. Her cheek had been swollen for too long. There was maybe something wrong with the stitches. “Fuck,” she said. “You didn’t even come with me for my wisdom teeth.” She wiped her mouth with one of Garret’s shirts. “You had to go to class? — you skip all your fucking classes!”
“That’s my shirt,” Garret said. “That’s inconsiderate.” Against the bureau was a stack of photos that they had taken together. “Take your photos,” Garret said. Kristy kicked them across the floor. She threw her sandals against the wall. They lodged in the window blinds and dust went in the air.
“Why are you acting like this?” Garret said.
Kristy set her luggage upright, the wheels aimed at the door. “Why don’t you install soundproof walls for your suitemate?” she said. “If you care about him so much, why don’t you?”
“I will,” Garret said. “That’s considerate of you, finally.” They looked at each other. Blood oozed again out of Kristy’s mouth, and then out her nose, like a crushed thought. She went and grabbed her sandals from the blinds. She set her luggage outside the door, got in position to properly slam the door with both hands, and then slammed it. The door bounced off its frame without closing.
Kristy wheeled her luggage down the outside hall. It made squeaky noises, and train track noises. Garret sat and listened. For a moment he felt sorry for her, for himself, for the whole wrecked and blighting world — it was hopeless, really — but then he felt okay, felt that things were not that bad; he felt friendly, and he felt that this moment of softness, of calm, though maybe it was just that he was tired, was good, was enough, that if there could be this feeling, then things would go on, month after month, one good and tiny feeling per; it was okay. And he wanted suddenly, badly, to share all this, and so he called out, “Have a good week.” He stood and shouted, “Wait; I hope you can be happy now; I hope we can be friends still, really,” and then Kristy was back, was looking, was saying, “You’re a real shithead,” was saying some other things, her face inflamed, and the door, then, slamming shut, making a loud noise.
Three-Day Cruise
After they euthanatize the poodle, they go on the Bahamas cruise. After that, the dad dies of a brain tumor that no one knew about. The mom, then, at Cocoa Beach, teaching herself to swim, drowns; and the son, Paul, too, dies, when he one night sees a car crash happening, is looking, passing by, but then has a dull thought — some sudden vapid mood that almost puts him to sleep — yawns, and swerves, in an abstractly wanting and participatory way, toward the crash. He accelerates, misses, and drives into a pole.
The daughter, Mattie, goes on living. She sometimes shuts her eyes, tight, and then opens them again, placing herself in next week’s Sunday. It’s a kind of time travel. Something make believe, for kids. Though of course, Mattie knows, she is not a kid. She is in her thirties, in Florida, where she grew up. She has returned. She sometimes feels as if there is a quick-person, five minutes ahead of her, living her life before she gets there. There is one week in all the others when she joins a gym, buys expensive facial creams, and sits sipping broth in the food courts of shopping malls. It is not a bad week. She remembers that week. Then she doesn’t remember it. She remembers nothing. All her memories go to noise, go satirical and loud and uncontrollable — they fly like teeth and balloons from her brain to the open bones of her eyes, and clang there, lodge and impact and burst there. The months accumulate like houses in the middle of nowhere. And her sense of irony, finally, her cheap way of paradox, of that self-blanking kind of truth and calm, of easing, sometimes, into the sarcastic haze of living — it goes bad, like an awful, leaden, jam-packed something in her head. Mattie is eating a sandwich. She is scribbling poems on envelopes. She is distracted, she is old. She is dead from something that makes her forget what it is before it kills her.
Mattie is twelve. She feels, today, for the first time, that happiness is something behind her, something mousy and slick and sliding away, into some hole, into some hole of that some hole.
“Do you ever feel sad?” says Mattie. She and Paul are at the supermarket. She is looking at a blow-dryer box, the woman on which has her hair in such a way that she must, Mattie thinks, be flying.
“What’s happier,” says Paul. He is six. “The most happy rabbit in the world? A man that is normal happy? A cookie? Between one and a hundred how happy is a cookie? A green one.” They are at the supermarket for AAA batteries.
“Forty,” says Mattie. “Wait. A green one?” She’s looking at the blow-dryer box. “I can’t see out my right eye,” she says. “It’s blurry. Oh, now I can.”
“Oh,” says Paul. He giggles. “What kind of batteries won’t rip you off? This one has Michael Jordan on it. Michael Jordan is funny.”
“This lady is flying. This is … unacceptable,” says Mattie. She’s thinking about dirt — dirt on the ground, in hair, dirt in the sky. She had a dream about dirt. “I hate … school.”
“Why?” says Paul. He looks stricken for a moment, a little horrified.
“I’m twelve,” says Mattie. “I’m twelve years old!”
“Michael Jordan is strange,” says Paul.
They buy Energizer batteries. The parking lot gleams from all the cars. They cross the street, into their neighborhood. Some older kids are gliding around on rollerblades, playing street hockey. One little girl has a baseball bat and is chasing a few of the others. It is sunny and October and breezy. “The air tickles,” says Paul. He has Michael Jordan in his head, and can’t stop giggling. He blocks the wind from his neck with strangling motions and says, “My hands tickle!” In front of their house, he cartwheels onto grass. He runs at Mattie and jump kicks the air in front of her. Mattie pats his head. Paul goes and hops, circuitously, over a red flower plant. He looks at Mattie and then runs into the house, the front door of which is open.