American Spirit: A Novel (14 page)

Yes, About Last Night…

W
AKING UP, TRYING TO
add it up, and there are some significant dots one must connect. The temptation to get out of the house last night proved to be too much, the brain recalls this, but that’s really all that the faculties of Matthew can recollect at the moment, which is where connecting the dots comes in. The first dot, the biggest dot, is a dot called The Gun. Matthew recalls drinking, and this was after walking past on the sidewalk in front of Tatiana’s apartment on Bond Street more than a few times; on the first pass he walked a crisp pace with purpose; then after regrouping around the corner on Lafayette, he walked by again, this time slowly, trying hard to appear poetic and pensive; on other passes Matthew was walking by at any pace that might have looked great on the off chance that
Tatiana was in from Los Angeles. And on the off chance that she just happened to be entering or leaving her building. And on the off chance that she would even recognize him. But she wasn’t, and she didn’t, and she probably wouldn’t, so then there was drinking.

The Bavarian mobile office and den was parked on East Third or Great Jones or somewhere near enough to Bond but not too sadly and desperately close to it. Wherever it was that the land barge was anchored, there were evidently bars all around it, practically closing in on it and slowly surrounding it, actually. Chances are that the car would be slept in, especially with Tatiana being a safe three thousand miles west of it. So the first bar was Jones and the booze there made the migration from the back bar, to the drink mat, to the bar’s top side, and finally down the hatch. Mardi Gras beads, and a menu that never changes because it’s painted on the wall, a bust of Elvis on a shelf, a blue bulb in the bathroom, a bartender splitting his attention between making solid stiff drinks and serving bowls of crayfish and jambalaya to people who wanted to waste their buzz with food. The whiskey did its seductive dance right up to the handshake with the lips, which led straight to a little romp upstairs with the brain. The jukebox was tons of old stuff you never get to hear; it was lit and loud like everyone, it did the tighten up, and there wasn’t a steely cautionary downbeat parable to be had in any of it; there was Cash, there were Raconteurs going into the real nitty-gritty of Southern Culture on the Skids. Each drink took Matthew a hundred miles south of
New York City until he was, well, about nine hundred miles south. The jukebox went on until it sounded like every song in the world featured Katy Rose Cox on the fiddle; it went on until Matthew was feeling guided by voices.

This leads to spirited conversation with anyone who will listen, and surprisingly three young people did. Two guys and a girl, maybe sixty-five collective years between them, they kept listening to him, stayed the long haul of Blenheim’s and Maker’s, and Buckhorn and Maker’s, and Maker’s and Maker’s. And as the long haul went on, all four of them, all one hundred and ten collective years of them, went outside for a smoke together, once or three or five times. And then they even set forth on an expedition to the car when Matthew enlisted them to search for the little bags marked blue and yellow or green and blue or whatever the hell Tatiana had left him with. And that’s where the gun comes in. But one has to understand that the gun wasn’t brought out in any sort of menacing way. There was a certain amount of edge to Matthew’s inspired street sermon, sure, probably only the effect of not finding the drugs and finally being fresh out of cigarettes. Matthew was simply trying to emphasize some of the points he was making while talking to these kids. So as a means of underlining certain points, if you will, the gun, yes, fine, was taken out and waved around a bit. It’s important for the head to make a level argument while waking up this morning that the gun was waved around only as a flourish, really—and only during the underlined words that Matthew felt needed emphasis.

“I’ve torn my car apart for twenty minutes and I don’t know where that stuff is. I probably sound like some nutcase dipshit, but basically I was this, like, superhot millionaire woman’s dealer. Just for one day. She’s, I don’t know what she is, but she has houses all over the world and she just, you know, she’s rich. She’s beautiful. And we hooked up. And then she basically buys a bunch of shit from me and hands it right back to me and is like, ‘This is for you because you’re connected to something so, like, huge in the universe right now,’ or something like that. I can’t remember everything she said.”

The three young people were kind of laughing about this, and that might’ve been what started Matthew feeling the need to employ gun flourishes in the conversation. But it wasn’t unkind laughter on their part, though; it was spirited; these kids saw Matthew as another random measure of jazz after years spent living in a world where dinner had always been served at six and every adult who loved them or taught them was hoping they’d end up squares with sensible haircuts and dental insurance. Here were two long, tall young men whose eyes, only four or five years ago, were staring at the ceilings of suburban bedrooms on sleepless nights with parents just down the hall. And her, she was a stick figure of a girl, skinny jeans barely letting her ankles out, thin lips on a narrow, pale slivered moon of a face waiting for a kiss from someone who wasn’t a best friend or a steady bore betting on a future going according to plan.

“I don’t even know what you guys do now. I mean I think
I’ve got a basic grasp of what growing up in America is like for you guys these days. When you’re fifteen you use the Internet to tease kids from school until they commit suicide. Then you live with your parents until you’re thirty because there’s no shame in it now or something. You skip college to invent Internet stuff, you stage weird homoerotic gang fights in basements, and you sell your companies for billions and have bonfires and orgies in the desert. You buy old vinyl records from the seventies, which actually kind of appeals to me, but it’s also kind of condescending. The three of you probably have enough cash liquid at any given moment to have me killed on a dare. You know what? I feel awesome. I feel awesome tonight. Right now. Now. We’re all here now and this is the best night of my life. Tonight is our time. Time is finite. We can’t stand still; we can’t die. We cannot die!”

And on that last note, that last emphatic wave of the gun, that’s when they started looking a little skittish and concerned about the situation. In retrospect, Matthew gets it: Basically you can’t use a gun as a conversational prop when you’re screaming into the night about how the four of you will never die; the nuanced subtext becomes too easy to misunderstand when you introduce the gun. But all Matthew meant is that time is finite and you have to live each day while you have it if you want to live a full life. It was something that Milton had told him in almost every session. He would say that we have only so many days. He would say that we have to choose action and live the days we have; that staying sedate and not moving a muscle and not choosing
action over being static, that was what killed us. But before Matthew could explain it, they all scattered in a blitz, running off and yelling shit over their shoulders back at him.

At the time, Matthew rationalized their behavior. Stood there by the car quietly watching them disappear, convincing himself he understood yet another thing about their generation. He told himself that it was nothing to do with him, that the mind and body simply do funny things at their age when an entire young adrenal gland is emptied in spasm with too much speed to handle, flooding blood already thin with booze. But then Matthew felt his own chemicals change and administer a surge of disbelief and sadness. And this is probably just the buyer’s remorse that comes with owning a weapon; but still, it wasn’t long ago, in the office, that anyone their age would display a workplace reverence if even thinking about asking his permission to leave before him.

He stood next to the car, looking around sheepishly in case there were police the way there always are in movies when things end up like this. He puts the gun back under the seat way too gingerly; he gives drunken gravitas a shot and comes up this flat: “I basically have seniority. Over all of them.”

And now, here, this morning, waking up in the car, there isn’t much point in doing the math about how he and the Bavarian motor situation navigated this blind path back; no sense trying to figure what the brain had in mind when it parked them here in front of houses clear on the other side of Westport, nowhere near the one Matthew is supposed to
sleep in. The gray light outside puts this at about six; maybe seven. Waking up in a car was more fun at seventeen and even twenty-seven.

Your heart won’t hang on much longer.

“Shut up,” the brain says.

Find someone to fall in love with before everything in you stops working forever.

“Be quiet.”

Water, water, water.

“Yes, water!”

The mouth is all Mojave and cracked dash, and every move it makes feels like razor blades on new skin. Water, water, water, water, there’s no other way to say it emphatically. It can’t be stated plainly enough, this level of thirst. You’d have to wave the gun a dozen times and fire it twice to even underline the word
water
enough. Matthew opens the door and rolls from the car in slow motion and crawls a few paces, pulling his pants up to cover the crack of his ass, he walks a straight path hunched over a bit so that ideally nobody sees him making his way from the street and up into the lawn. Who knows whose house this is, but it’s a house with a hose on the side of it and hoses are full of cool, clean water and hoses pump it into you faster than you can drink it. A drive to someplace where a bottle of water is sold would be a drop in the bucket; it would be like waiting thirty days and wading through paperwork to buy a gun with the credit card in your name and in your pocket; no, the body requires a flood aimed into the neck and unleashed in almost homoerotic folly;
brought on like a flood that rages in, biblical in scale. Up the little walk, and the reflection on the window makes it hard to see in, so Matthew’s crouch gets lower and he attempts precision; tired and hungover but locked into this low-profile recon posture like a man sneaking in to the enemy camp. Up to the hose and turn it on, and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. If there were a fire hydrant next to this house, he would get his mouth around it somehow.

The body is filling up now, cold and clear, and all the brain can think is:
Drain this home of its bounty; suck this thing like you owe it money.
The eyes close, the cool, clear flood pumps in faster than the throat can find a place to route it; the mouth is a reservoir too full in the first millisecond, the stomach is like the town below it sandbagged and nervous. The throat is quenched and chilled too fast, the stomach stretches to get more in, and then, Jesus, what, yes, vomiting. But the water is hosing it from the face as fast as it can splatter out. Violent heaves yield mostly booze and a few soaked-soft and waterlogged tails of crayfish, the hose fills the stomach cool and clear and anew at almost the same second it is evacuated. The eyes wince closed with every hard heave of this cleansing; this system is instant and insane, and for a flash Matthew is thinking that this is the cleanest anybody has ever been from outside in. Slaked and free of the cracked dehydrated longing, Matthew is clearly not unbowed from the last night’s damage, but he’s also oddly brand-new again. A man finds out what he’s made of when essentially fellating
another man’s real estate; doing that to another man’s home is the moment when one tends to take that fearless inventory of the shape things are in, really. He’s hungover, for eyes he still has chipped blue and red marbles lost in dark ocular caves, he’s still lonely and aimless, but he’s also reset and all better. If one is not careful in a moment like this, it’s easy to think every morning should start this way.

Open the eyes now, open them and look at the man standing in the house’s living room staring out at you, silent and calm, in awe of this stranger’s depraved morning constitutional. He was hidden, for who knows how long, by the sheen of early morning gray light putting a haze and tint on the living room window. Matthew finishes, shuts the hose off, and tosses it back to where it was hanging coiled. The face feels a thin, warm southbound migration toward the mouth and realizes the nose is bleeding generously. The brain’s simple directives are to walk back to the car, walk like an athlete off the field; long and languid, head down a bit, walk across the grass and oh, what the hell, turn around and wave at the guy after what you just did to his house. So Matthew turns and gives him a humble wave like the man is a fan who’s been waiting for acknowledgment. The quiet man stands in his robe; there in his living room window taking it all in, probably figuring Matthew is evidence of exactly what waits out there away from the comfortable confines and routines of marriage and employment. This strange man on the front lawn; who slept in a car in front of the house; who snuck
up on the garden hose like a drowsy, half-assed sniper; who vomited and gagged when he pumped his stomach with delicious water; who waved casually like an exhausted hero while his nose bled a warm crimson river—the man in the living room looks out at him, probably thinking: It’s so hard to tell if that’s what freedom is.