Slonim Woods 9, page 19
“That’s right.”
“If another guy ever went against me, he knew I wouldn’t just hurt him, would I, Lee? I wouldn’t just beat him up. That would be too easy.”
“No, Larry.” Lee looked awkward, leaning forward, forearms on his knees, hands bridged. He was somehow too big for his gray suit, and the suit was also too big for him. Both men seemed titanic, while I was shrinking into the couch. Lee had gone to prison for some kind of Internet fraud; I didn’t know much more than that.
“I’d be much more precise than that, much more effective.” There was a gleam in Larry’s eye. “Tell him what I’d do, Lee.”
“The vas deferens.” He made a snipping gesture with his fingers. “He’d cut it.”
“That’s exactly correct. Danel, do you know what that is? That’s the vessel running along the underside of your cock. One snip, delicate, deliberate, and you can never get hard again. How would you like that?”
I hadn’t realized I’d been looking at my hands, pushing the ends of my fingertips into one another, flattening them. I looked up. “I wouldn’t,” I said. The scene began to change, merge, and now it was just me and Larry in the room. Through the window, I could see it snowing. There were wood planks piled around the room for carpentry projects, buckets of paint all over the place, a workbench in the living room, and a sound like a jackhammer making the windows rattle in their frames. Plastic was hanging everywhere so the room looked like the den of a giant spider. Larry was wearing a mask and goggles, holding what looked like a chrome hypodermic needle with a long rubber tube coming out of the back, which was attached on the other end to a compressor. The needle produced a mist that slowly coated the hallway walls with a color like the inside of a body. I was standing on a ladder, waiting for Larry to tell me what was next, feeling heavier and heavier, and then I began to fall.
I landed in the apartment again, but now there was a Christmas tree in the corner all lit up with big multicolored Charlie Brown bulbs. We were giving one another presents. Larry and Iban were talking about their time in the military, and Larry was describing the satisfaction of shooting someone in the head with a sniper round, the high that comes from your first “pink mist.” I unwrapped my present from Santos, which was Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
Dan,
Here is to gaining and forever treasuring clarity.
Your friend,
Santos
P.S.
I am honored that we could go on this journey at the same time and I am forever honored and grateful for your friendship. You are a great man and a best friend. Thank you.
Larry saw it and clapped Iban on the back. “You ever read that during basic training? Danel, flip to book three, number five. What does it say there?”
I looked down. Though the words were blurry and seemed to move on the page, I heard myself saying them. “ ‘How to act: Never under compulsion, out of selfishness, without forethought, with misgivings. Don’t gussy up your thoughts. No surplus words—’ ”
“No, no, not there. The end, Danny, the last one. Look at what it says. ‘Straight, not straightened,’ right?”
I looked down again. I knew it said ‘To stand up straight—not straightened,’ which wasn’t exactly the same, but it wasn’t worth what would happen if I read it out exactly as written.
“Yeah, exactly,” I said.
“Now what do you think that means? Iban?”
Iban sat up straighter. “I think it means that one has control over one’s own life. That if one is deliberate, thoughtful, and direct, they can achieve any objective.”
Larry smiled and looked at me. For a second, I was in both places at once, and he was looking at the version of me asleep on the library floor. “That’s exactly right, Iban,” he said. “But it has a deeper meaning, layered into the grammar, which you wouldn’t understand unless you could read the original Greek. Your house burns down. You decide how you react, right? But you don’t decide whether it is fundamentally good or bad, because it isn’t up to you. It’s neither. It just is the way it is, a priori, not made that way, not acted upon. Straight, not straightened. You can’t change anything outside yourself. That is what is different about me. I can make things good or bad for you. I can tap into that part of you, that judgment part, and make adjustments. I can help you learn how to do that for yourself, too. How about this for a quote—you better know this one, Danel, big poet, right? ‘Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ What’s that from?”
* * *
I woke up on the floor of the library basement. The walls were closing in on me. I tried to shake off the dream, thinking I must still be half asleep, but the walls kept closing, the far shelf was starting to push my feet, and I realized someone was turning the wheel. “Hey!” I shouted hoarsely. The shelves stopped moving. I tucked Shakespeare under my arm and stumbled out of the aisle, but no one was there.
I WAS SITTING IN Larry’s new car idling on Ninety-third Street at eight a.m., waiting for a parking spot to open up. I’d made a big deal in my head about coming back to the apartment, freaked myself out, gotten “spun up,” as Larry would say. I had to try to see things more clearly. The Marcus Aurelius book Santos gave me was helping. Just this morning, before running down to move the car before alternate side parking came into effect, I’d read:
You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones—the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you’d be ashamed to be caught thinking.
I could fix myself by controlling the inside of my head. It was my thoughts that were making me so stressed out. What else did it mean to be “present” or “grounded,” other than knowing what was in your head, every moment? Wasn’t anxiety just a fear of the unknown? All I needed to do was manage my mind so that every thought I had was a good one. Nothing random, nothing malignant.
I put the hazards on and leaned my seat back. Larry had leased the white SUV under someone else’s name. Iban’s, I thought. The conspiracy against Larry orchestrated by Bernie Kerik and Larry’s ex-wife, Teresa, made it impossible for him to get his ID reissued after getting out of jail, so that made things as straightforward as leasing a car impossible. Not to mention that the people who were conspiring against him made it potentially dangerous for him to foray outside. These were the kinds of injustices we were able to rectify, by offering up our identities for a car lease, or going out to buy the groceries. Since I’d come back from England and moved into the apartment again, I’d noticed that Larry didn’t leave the apartment at all anymore, just worked in the bathroom all day for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then all night on woodworking and renovations. At least the place was somewhat clean now, as in disinfected, ever since Claudia’s mom had insisted on coming over the other day. Right before she’d showed up Larry had us wiping down every surface with Simple Green, which he said was what they used in the marines. We should use so much, he’d said, that Claudia’s mom should be able to smell it when she came over. Then she would associate the place with cleanliness, and subconsciously understand that it was all under control. It didn’t matter that she had to step over piles of wood and around a worktable to get to the couch.
Street sweeping would be over at nine, at which point cars would descend on the empty parking spots like flies. In the meantime, I could get some sleep. I lay there, half reclined, listening to the vague sounds of construction that drifted through the car windows from the always unfinished city. Last night, Felicia, Santos’s older sister, had helped with the woodworking project that had kept us up through the night. She was a doctor finishing her residency in California. When I got back from England, she was living at the apartment. I’d been too afraid to ask how she got there, but I slowly pieced it together.
Santos had put Larry in touch with her because she’d been having some kind of breakdown. Then, shockingly, it had turned out that she, too, was involved with the conspiracy against Larry. He’d gotten on the phone with her and, after talking to Larry for hours, she’d revealed everything. Ominous people had been watching her, just as Larry had suspected. They’d been in contact with her even, and these people turned out to be connected to Bernie Kerik. They were coming after her now, because she didn’t want to be involved anymore. The only way she would be safe was if she was in Larry’s care—he was the only one who really understood what was going on. Besides that, she was suicidal. She had been her whole life, it turned out. Felicia flew cross-country from California to New York, the city where she’d grown up and where her parents still lived, and moved into the apartment with Larry. Whether or not it was true was irrelevant; the fact that Larry had gotten her to give up everything and come here—someone who was about to be a doctor—that alone confirmed his abilities. If he was able to do that, then everything else must be real as well.
I decided to try driving the car around the block again just in case I got in trouble for idling on the street, or got in trouble with Larry for not trying to find a spot quickly. There were things to do upstairs; dawdling would be intentional sabotage. We were finally going to clean up the crates of clothes and knickknacks and memorabilia, the history of Talia and Larry’s life before we came into the picture, and take them to Larry’s storage unit. I couldn’t believe this hadn’t happened the whole time I’d been gone in England, but that just went to show how obstructive everyone who was staying in the apartment had been in my absence. Larry had told me all about it when I’d gotten back. Up in the apartment, the boxes and crates full of clothes and keepsakes were getting overrun by tools, workbenches, cans of paint (“Bermuda Sunrise”—a putrescent, fleshy pink Talia had chosen), and white primer; smaller cans of mineral spirits, mineral oil, and paint thinner; the air compressor connected to the high-volume low-pressure paint sprayer and its briefcase of delicate, expensive needles; HVAC ventilation systems; long, flat stacks of exotic hardwood; garbage bags full of drywall from the wall between the kitchen and living room, which Larry had knocked out to make a pass-through; blue painter’s tape in rolls of various widths, the widest of which Larry had explained were surprisingly expensive; and stacks of plastic, ready to be draped between rooms, shrouds to keep the pink mist from traveling, which it did regardless.
As I pulled around the corner on Ninety-sixth Street, I saw a spot and beelined for it. I adjusted my seat back, which I realized had been reclined the whole time. I thought about calling my parents, but what would I say? I’m going to keep living at Larry’s all summer, and in the fall, I’ll commute up to school in Bronxville. No, I don’t have a job, I’m helping Larry. I owe him for all the help he’s given me. Trust me. It all made sense. They just didn’t see things clearly, the way I was learning to.
* * *
Felicia let me into the apartment, and I stepped past her through the translucent plastic hanging over the door. She fell back onto the couch and pulled her laptop onto her lap. The hoodie she was wearing engulfed her—it looked like she was floating in a pool of gray with only her face breaking the surface. The other chairs were stacked with boxes, paint trays, shims, and paint stirrers, except one, which was clear. I couldn’t take the only chair and leave nowhere for Larry to sit when he came out of the bathroom or the bedroom, whichever door he was currently behind. There were a few spots of unoccupied space on the living room carpet, so I sat down between stacked cans of paint and the HVAC air filter, a tall white box on four wheels built for a woodshop, which Larry said we were going to hang from the ceiling by the chains coiled in the corner.
The bedroom door opened after a few minutes and Larry came out, followed by Isabella and Talia. He was wearing nothing but his briefs, which had been the case more and more since I’d come back. If he was wearing his polo and nice, pressed jeans, plus the neon-yellow running shoes he’d taken to wearing at all times outside the apartment, it meant he was meeting someone. For a while now, we’d all been wearing nearly the same getup whenever we went anywhere outside the apartment. Bright colors meant you were secure in your masculinity or your femininity, that you had nothing to hide. In the apartment, though, Larry was often dressed as he was now, in nothing but tighty-whities, sinking into the chair, the gray curls of hair on his chest a little matted. For a second I could see the hairs up close, right above me, inches from my face, moving back and forth, a drop of sweat forming among them—I closed my eyes tight, then opened them again, and I was back in the room. As Larry sat in the open chair, he looked around, searching for a spot to put his backpack down. “Let’s move some of this shit out of the way, Danny, come on! Make space for Talia and Isabella. What are you doing, just sitting here?”
My eyes snapped open. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Larry,” I said, rushing to try to move some of the clutter on top of other clutter. I picked up a can of paint in each hand and set them down on the long planks of wood stacked up below the window.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled. “Do you know how expensive that wood is? Come on, Danny, where’s your head at? What’s going on with you?”
“I don’t know!” I tried taking some of the paint trays off one of the chairs, and held the pile in my hand, paralyzed. “I don’t know!” I said again, my breath short.
“Danny, you’re spinning out. Clearly you know there’s something on your mind that you’re not sharing with me. Take a breath. Put those down.”
Isabella and Talia were watching through the blown-out wall, the cut and twisted metal studs hanging at odd angles with clinging hunks of broken drywall. The drywall was why we needed the air filter, Larry had said. It released gypsum dust into the air, which could give you a respiratory illness. Felicia was sitting up on the couch, watching me put the paint trays coated in dried white primer back onto the chairs that circled the glass table.
“Come over here, Danny, I want you to look at this.” I followed him into the kitchen, stepping carefully over tools and around the dovetailing jig. “Open the oven,” he said. The oven was new—restaurant quality, Larry had explained proudly when he had it brought into the apartment. A yellow tube snaked out the back, full of gas, I knew, because Larry had been so worried when he was installing it that one of us would try to sabotage him by causing a gas leak. “Get down there and open the door,” he said.
I opened it. There was nothing inside, just a gleaming, brand-new oven. The metal was almost bluish. “Get your head out of there. Close it again. You see? Do you want to explain this to me?” I was looking up at him, confused. “Danny, I want you to figure out what the hell you did while I get dressed.”
The hard tile was hurting my knees, but I knew I couldn’t move. He went into the bedroom. I tried to formulate a response. After a minute, when he came back out wearing pants and a polo, I blurted, “I’m sorry, Larry, I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’m sure whatever it was, I can fix it or make up for it.”
“You hear this?” he yelled into the living room. “Felicia, I want to make sure you’re hearing this. Come here and try this oven door.” Now they were both standing over me. She opened the oven door and then closed it. “It’s bent, right?” Larry asked her.
“Yeah, it’s bent,” she said.
“So either you’re calling me a liar, Danny, or you bent my oven door on purpose. Which is it?”
I thought, for a second, that maybe this was the lesson. I hadn’t actually bent the oven door, and he knew that. So the only logical conclusion was that I needed to learn to be yelled at. I needed to build experience in stressful situations like this to prepare for the world. It was like how Larry and Iban had described drill instructors, how they treat you in boot camp so that you’ll be able to endure much worse in the field. “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” the marines said. I had to learn to take this kind of confrontation, to be a man in the face of it.
“No, sir. Neither, sir. You’re not a liar, but I also didn’t bend it. I swear.”
“Neither, huh? You think you’re smarter than me, don’t you? See, I know you don’t believe I am who I say I am, Danny. It doesn’t make a difference if I prove it to you over and over. Something is broken in you that makes it impossible for you to believe. But that doesn’t matter to me, does it? Because it’s true. I know it’s true. I know what’s real. So let’s find out if you know better than I do.” He pulled a knife out from the drawer. The knives were all wrapped in paper towels and sealed with painter’s tape in a kind of sheath to protect the ceramic blades. Larry had said that ceramic knives were the sharpest—sharp enough to cut through bone—but brittle, so they might snap inside. I couldn’t make out what he’d chosen—something big—a chef’s knife or a cleaver. He slid the paper towel off the knife and left it on the counter. The unsheathed blade caught the light from the window behind me and seemed to cut through it. “Izzy, go line the tub with plastic for me, would you?” he yelled.
“Okay!” I heard her chirp back, then the rustle as she collected painter’s plastic from one of the piles and walked into the bathroom.
“Don’t look at her. Look at me,” he said. “Now, you say you didn’t break my oven. Is that true? I know what happened, Danny. I want you to try out telling the truth, for once.” The knife was hovering in the air above me. I didn’t doubt that he would do it. I could hear Isabella taking boxes out of the bathtub, clearing a space. I started to cry.
