everything we are is mostly okay

This has Moved (click)

Four pieces of tape. He says, “Now show me how you put this together.”

The dog climbs hills faster than me. I get to the top and the little shit’s already standing next to a tree.

I have no eggs or butter, but I know how to use a toaster. He’s still in bed when I come in saying, “Here’s something I made for you.”

The smelly dog waits by the door because we haven’t let him out in hours. I put on running shorts, stretch my hamstrings. “Just wait a second,” I tell him, but he’s already licking my knee.

It’s foggy and cold and I can’t see anything in front of me. There’s a house with its door wide open, I think. Little dark figures move out into the fog, hands moving back and forth.

“I’m sure,” he says but does not finish. We have being driving this roundabout for the last hour. He does not stop the car even to let me pee.

This dog is not to be trusted. Just yesterday I saw him sniff a pigeon in the park and walk away from it.

He is a boy and I say that with as much love as I can being that I am the kind of person who is in love with him. My god, he has the largest pores!

We do not go to my apartment but take the dog to the park instead. I say, “that dog would be useless at guarding our house,” but I am wrong to mention this word in front of him and I am certain I have upset the dog.

It is all cleansers and facial pads I see when I look inside his cabinet. There is not even a single Xanax. “How am I supposed to survive your driving?” I say. Nothing is ever good enough for me. I make one exception to this rule, but I cannot say it out loud.

The sun is down when we arrive but it is not late, even though I am sure he is unhappy with me. I am always the one to think this first and it shows. We left the dog in a raincoat on the porch because he refused to come inside. I think it was the part where I called him a tadpole and meant it, but not to the dog.

Oh, who the fuck are you?

We’re on the steps of my apartment. He’s staring at my hands.

“You have the hands of an old man,” he says.

“It’s from working outside,” I say.

It is true I have never worked a day outside in my life, but I want him to believe in this more than anything.

He places a dollop of unscented lotion on my palm.

“It’s getting dark,” he says.

Then, “I don’t believe you.”

The sky above our heads is dark blue, full of white, soft things.

He said there were little things popping inside the room. I looked up from my magazine. He was by the electric radiator, his ear an inch above the metal rods. “It sounds like water being boiled alive,” he said. He was my best friend who was also afraid of water. When we were kids I held him under the water until I couldn’t see the top of his head anymore. I was an excellent swimmer. I won awards. I kept trophies on the tops of shelves my dad made. “You’re going to kill your friend,” he’d said. My dad had small hands, drank bad coffee from a #1 Dad mug. I was an only child. “But what if I’m the only one who can bring him back to life?” My dad wiped his hands on a towel full of dried wood stain. I popped my knuckles, listened to the quiet of the room.

“Here,” he says, sitting lopsided on the chair. He has scattered pieces of paper across the table. “You sign here. Here and here and here and here.” I watch him finish his espresso, place the small cup onto the tiny saucer, wrap his hands around it trying to keep in the remaining warmth. “This, here, too,” he says, and I know it means were in this together.

I watch Marcus fish his ring out of the bathroom pipe.

There's a pair of pliers, metal washers, bits of pomegranate flesh.

Marcus is on the phone. I hear him mention my name. I listen with my ear against the door. I even have a glass!

“But you’re in my bedroom,” I say.

“Go and hide,” Marcus says.

I find a cool spot in the shower, lie down, fall asleep for what seems like hours.

We drive by the crater. Jim smoothes the hairs on his legs. I picture the crater filled with salt water, us floating around inside like we’re in a lake. Jim smells like dryer sheets and deodorant. We stop for the night and I watch him take a shower, sit on the edge of the tub with a map of California. I tell him the eggs of brine shrimp can live for years under the right conditions. He takes a mouthful of water, spits it on my back. When we were kids I used to poke his body with things from my own. It made this sound like pop and then, nothing.

There are excuses. Small lies. Things I tell myself so I can sleep easier at night.

I leave before the wife gets home. She’s walking up while I’m pretending to look at something on my feet.

“Oh, it’s just a bite,” I say.

“A little fucking bite!”

Marcus makes sure I know what he has on his fingers. He twirls them around, says, “Look at me go with these stupid things.”

I stand in the kitchen with half-emptied lungs.

He says, “They’re dancing!”

I say, “Yes, Marcus, and soon they’ll be fighting. Soon they’ll be in bed. Soon there’ll be a whole new set to name over again.”

I make a list for the store: cupcake liners, something blue and miniature, graham crackers, Arizona tea.

“I hate the sweet kind,” he says.

“Does it come in anything else?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“Then you’ll have to drink it.”

Finger puppets line the table, the small, knitted kind, given to us by the families of children we once knew.

Marcus finds me by the refrigerator. He says the chlorine is turning my hair green. Says we should drain the pool.

I look out to the yard, the pool of bluish-green water, the khaki-colored stone we picked out because it matched the house.

He asks if I’m okay.

He says, “You have to be okay.”

What I’m doing, it’s something insignificant and small, like breathing.

The windows are open. The inside of the house smells like Lemon Pledge. William plays with a pile of leaves on the kitchen table. I hand him a tube of super glue, tell him to shape them into a skyscraper.

This is not about my father or the places he has been.

There will later be ironing, more things in black, William folding with big hands so everything fits in one suitcase.

Whatever comes of this will be something clean, something I can show to others and say, “look how it glows.”

William turns off the sink, rubs his hands on a dishtowel. He makes a face I can’t believe I once fell in love with.

“We don’t have to do this,” he says. “He was an awful man.”

“He’s my father,” I say.

William puts his hands on my chest, feels around for something warm.

I watch a bird on the feeder. I hear its beak knock against the wood, remember when I bought the feeder thinking they’d never come, thinking I’d never see anything fly up and stick its mouth inside.

We were down by the lake. Griff wanted to see how far he could throw. I sat on a bench thinking about fish, whether their families missed them when they were gone.

Griff said, “Fuck it.”

He’d hoped to make something skip across the water. I told him to save it for the movies, things like that were always happening there.

He drove us to an old drive-in where we ate greasy burgers.

I said my stomach hurt.

I threw up in the bathroom.

We went to the observatory where we watched smog hang over the city. Griff mentioned my dry hands, freakishly large feet.

At home, I slipped out of my clothes and sunk into bed. Griff got on top of me and made me promise not to look him in the eyes.

I did because there was nowhere else to look.

He pressed the cartilage in my lower back. His skin didn’t smell like anything, which I thought was weird.

“You’re taking off,” he said. “Don’t let go.”

I might have been lifted into the air. Or was it the other way around? Griff held me down by my wrists and said, “Don’t you fucking cry!”

I watched power lines outside the window, something invisible but all around like ghosts or dead skin.

They were twins. They asked the cashier if she knew who was the rightful owner of the store discount card. It was a game they played. They wanted to see who paid attention.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Him, I guess.”

She tried going cross-eyed. She blinked twice, decided it was impossible.

“Wrong,” Gerald said. “That’s Harold.”

“Right,” she said.

They were buying paper plates, frozen dinners, boxes of instant potatoes.

“I’ll give you another shot,” Gerald said. “Which one of us was born first?”

She rang up a package of egg noodles. She watched the laser fill the bag. She thought of bouncing around somewhere unguided like a beam of light.

“This will go on until I answer correctly, won’t it?” she said. “Anyway,” she said. “It’s that one.”

“Wrong,” Harold said. “I was born second. Twenty-six seconds, to be exact.”

She’d been waiting all day for them to arrive. They had been along with this routine for years. In the back room, the other cashiers wrote notes, stuck them to office billboards.

Who was Harold today?

Who did Gerald first kiss in the third grade?

What is the name of Harold and Gerald’s first pet?

What is that thing growing on Harold’s neck?

The cashier followed them out to their car. She leaned against the black SUV. She looked at the concrete building housing the store, gray like a tuna can. There was a red sign positioned above the sliding doors, partially illuminated with a broken H.

She bought pieces of dried fruit, some papaya. She had a voice that could corrupt, and she spoke very little. A man smiled at her on the street. She took a cab for the first time in her life.

She walked south through the village.

She found a narrow brownstone with plastic sheeting and yellow banner tape.

“Not a word,” she said. Then, “This, I mean.”

Inside she found a plastic chair, someone’s baggy jeans, a room inscribed with, this is the most happy you will ever be.

Daylight came, then left again. Claude fished out a sweater from a pile of dirty clothes. It was paisley and looked like wallpaper.

I drove until I found the only diner that was open. Claude ordered ham on rye and a coke.

“It’s boring here,” he said. “Let’s go someplace else.”

“You got any money?”

“No,” he said.

We stayed to watch the sun appear over the city like this ghostly thing meant for two.

“There’s too much smog,” he said.

At my father’s house Claude swam in his briefs. He stood in the morning light looking at me like what cold?

We laid next to the pool as the sun moved higher in the sky. It was a test to see who touched who first. Time came next. This was the point where one of us lost it to the other. We were both new at this, I think. It’s better if you see it that way.

Finn put the car in reverse. He wore his mother’s cardigan. Xx was in the passenger seat, tuning the radio to static. He sang low notes. Sang, “xxxx xx xxxx xxx.”

Finn and Xx drove most nights.

The car had tire chains put on by Finn’s father, the mechanic.

Finn drove through forest, snow, night. He sang something from the radio that went, “xxxx xx xxxx xxx.”

Xx was asleep. Finn thought of turning his body into something prolific like a child's. He touched Xx’s arms, chest, legs.

Said, “xxxx xx xxxx xxx.”

They sat around watching House. “It’s never going to be lupus,” Jake said. Jake looked like Wilson from the TV show House. Like Robert Sean Leonard in that movie where he commits suicide.

Jake took the dog outside.

It was winter in Manhattan.

Jake thought about spotted snow, yellow circles from where dogs had pissed and melted down the white. He said, “maybe it’s a bladder thing.”

He looked up and wet filled his eyes, so he blinked. A dull glow, alternating between color temperatures, lit his apartment window.

Later that week he’d be upstate, looking at stars through a telescope his father had bought him. He’d tell everyone around him, “I just saw the must beautiful thing.” They’d look, stop and say, “whatever it was, we don’t want to know.”

We waited for our mother to collect her things. This time it was an alabaster lamp. She held it between her hands, the cord at her side.

We both knew it is my brother who would handle this life.

I was in charge of the festivities.

I brought her outside.

My mother, with her thinning hair and flat feet, said, “I will one day be thankful for this day.”

All the men she loved. There were thirteen in total. Each with a gray suit and pale complexion. She wondered if they were the same man. If someone had made a life out of convincing her that love was something which needed replacement.

She was known for her posture.

She collected horse figurines and kept them in a box inside her closet marked, things of my mother.

Leif with the blue eyes, here he is saying, “This is disappointing.”

His hand is in a glass of ice water. It’s swelling from an earlier incident with a door. The room, what is it, it’s covered in fake gold leaf. We’re at dinner.

“I’m in the mood for steak,” he says, shaking the water off his hand.

“Should you be eating with that hand?” I say.

I’m waiting for a moment. It doesn’t come, so then it’s the bread. There is butter on the table but no silverware.

“It’s not like I can’t cut. It’s just sore.”

A man comes, delivers rolls and small plates with flowers etched around the lip and tiny knives. Leif checks his ability to grip.

“I warned you about cars,” I say.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he says.

Leif cuts a roll in half. I look around the restaurant and realize how underdressed I am for these occasions.

“You see,” Leif says, holding a roll in the air.

“I do,” I say.

Later in the night there will be a movie. I will visit Blockbuster and pick out any film not featuring a car. I’ll say, “Here Leif, just so we’re safe.”

I’m talking to Charlie my imaginary dog. If I lived someplace reasonable he might be real. He says move along dear with a southern accent. The way he speaks, it’s like an old time movie, and I love him for it. He wags his tail and moves to the other end of the apartment.

Outside it is sunny and warm and there are sirens and men panhandling in winter coats. I walk by the puppy store and eye one who could very well be Charlie but the tail is all wrong and the fantasy is ruined. I go for ice cream. I pick two flavors and a sugar cone and toppings which look like skyscrapers.

I call my ex and tell him to meet me in our favorite spot. We meet an hour later, and he asks me what’s wrong. I say I forgot, that it’s alright for him to leave. He says it’s okay, better than he expected. I imagine him thinking I had news about dying or communicable diseases or earthquakes in California. We sit this way until he decides that nothing is something better kept private and leaves.

At home Charlie’s on the bed tearing up my favorite pair of imaginary sneakers. I look at him with disappointment. We curl up in the sun and watch pigeons out the window. I think of their dumb eyes and stupid necks and how odd they'd look dancing with that bobbly motion of theirs. I look at Charlie and think about all the ways we would play in the sun.

H decided it impossible. He stopped petting the cat. He put on a record and cleaned the living room. He said, “this is our new life.” The cat didn’t look up. H busied himself with folding clothes. Later there would be an apple pie. He’d spend hours baking it for the cat. The cat, who didn’t care for apples, would sit on the windowsill licking his paw, meowing something not so easily translated into, “why on Earth did you bring me here?”

M rode a train upstate. He sat on his father’s porch and looked at the night sky. He made a list: tomatoes, basil, mixed varieties of beans. He said the word legume until it sounded forgettable. He thought briefly about his home in the city, his long train ride upstate, the salted peanuts he had earlier in the day and how the salt stayed in the back of his mouth, stuck between two teeth. He remembered the satisfaction he had when he pushed the last piece out and let it dissolve against his tongue.

I made due with what R said. There was some kind of spirit. Something in the walls. We spoke of it fondly.

R rented a cabin upstate. All we ate were corn flakes. We sat on blankets that smelled like dust. We left trails on anything wood: the floor, the coffee table, the tops of bedposts.

R was there for quiet. I stayed inside. I was afraid of bears and mountain lions and the outdoors. At night I heard screeching from owls that kept me awake and made me think of home.

I lit a fire. It was summer and the cabin filled with smoke and heat. R yelled to turn it off. I yelled, “the owls, the owls.” Later he came out covered in sweat and we made love with the spirit watching us until we coughed up smoke and it was over.

He said we should leave.

I had been good at making excuses, and this is what I did:

The next day, when he was out, I took all his belongings and burned them in the fireplace. I said to myself, “I will make progress of this life if it kills us both.”

There were three of us maybe two. N was saying something. I sat in that chair with my hands inside my pockets.

The car stopped moving.

“Look,” N said.

There was a dead animal in the middle of the road. I didn’t know what it was. N circled the body, then kneeled. That song came on the radio again.

“Don’t touch it,” I said.

I looked at the blood on the ground, in the headlights, the miscellaneous internal organs, the general redness of it all which looked more black. I leaned against the car and thought about the freckles up and down N’s arm, back, neck.

By then, I had decided, there were only us two.

N said, “We should do something.”

We made a pact. We carried the animal to the side of the road. We promised each other that somewhere, someday we would be in love.

We’re spaced out again. That’s J, with his magnetic arms, stuck to the oven door.

J says, “Just help me out.”

We laugh about this a little. He asks me to hit his arms. I step back and swing.

We’ll go on like this forever if we don’t stop ourselves, which we will.

I take a book and read it aloud. J is at the door pulling. There’s a thud and now he’s stuck to the legs of a chair.

I’m sitting across from him in a sweater reading aloud from this book. In this book someone named J gets stuck to metal things because his arms are magnetic. I don’t tell J this, and instead I read aloud from the more mundane parts.

I say, “Harriet hated sweaters because they made her think of sweating, which made her sweat.”

I say, “Harriet liked to swim because people could not tell the difference between the thin layer of sweat covering her body and the water evaporating from her skin.”

J says, “I once knew a girl named Harriet.”

He says, “Harriet loved to dance! Harriet was a great singer!”

I’m at the counter looking for the wooden spatula. This search would be much easier if I had a system to organize my life. And there it is, underneath the magazine they keep sending me, making a much bigger deal than any of this would ever be if seen outside of this house.

I’m on a train headed north. It’s sometime at night. I can’t make out the surroundings from the window. I like to think it matters, what’s out here. J said as much. Whatever it was, whatever he said, it’s not important right now. Okay, this much is a lie. It is, as I said, somewhat important.

The heat is on. I have on headphones. I remember train rides from when I was a kid. I watch the electronic exit sign change. I look at the windows which are detachable and fall outward to allow for easy escape and think how nice it would be to push one out now, but then I remember the cold.

J had said: “You should come.”

J said: “You, you, you.”

Whatever I am to do with You?

Jesus Christ this car is hot. I take off my jacket and press my face against the window. If I block the overhead light with my hands I can see trees and snow and darkness.

I say this to myself, again, again: You.

Here we go.

J is just some boy I know. What I’d do in the meantime was be wise and say this to myself.

I have no business on trains.

This car is not so hot.

We made due, that summer. What with that house in the mountains and how we pretended to be common. Okay, okay. There was a goat who didn’t like me. I tried to set trees on fire. I didn’t know what I was doing.

J said: “You shouldn’t try so hard.”

He did something with my hands.

“Well,” I said. I said that a lot.

J said: “There are other places people go to disappear. We just chose here. I think it’s suiting.”

I nodded.

Back then I didn’t ride in trains. I had no car. I worked in a city I hated and I stopped seeing people because I had nothing to offer them and because I was bored. Oh god, this is all a bad memory.

Here I have to stop.

There is a part of this trip I don’t like. It’s the same every time, which is to say this is the first time so that would be a lie. I don’t like this thinking. My head is still against the window, and I wonder what I am doing here. Here in this country. This country with snow and trees and people whose language I cannot speak.

J said: “Blah blah blah.”

What I’d heard: “Just come. You have your ways. It’ll be good for you.”

This, this I heard again and again.

“Well, shit.”