American Spirit: A Novel (16 page)

Matthew would be better qualified to read a fortune in tea leaves, but he holds these things up, scans them, and tries to see what he can see. Sees his heart, sees everything one only hears and believes on good faith to be inside of them. There are the ribs forming the cage for the delicate vital stuff. There’s the breath being held, keeping inflated these lungs to which one has done whatever they’ve done. There’s the liver, there’s the rest of it, a bunch of stuff that requires eight years of school to identify and get a read on. But then there’s the one thing there that keeps showing up: a solid mass; the light is bouncing it back; the film is screaming out how this foreign matter doesn’t fit—you don’t need to be a genius to see it. Matthew stands in the kitchen, pulling each sheet out of the large envelope, holding the big squares of emulsion up to the light above the stove, then up to the light in the ceiling,
and there it is, again and again. He double-checks the name, and yes, it is his name. And he double-checks the doctor’s name, and yes, it is his doctor. Film after film, the same solid matter, the same two names in the corners, and one date of birth, then a hyphen, then a blank with no end-date yet. Film after film, emotion 4, emotion 5, emotion 6, emotion 7.

There are a few beers to be fetched from the floorboard of the car. And there are a few shots of stiffer stuff in the kitchen to erase the pictures from the head. The drinks flow like drinks and then the arms flail in terrible tantrum. Smash this all now, fuck it all, the brain knows there’s something wrong with the biological container that houses it. Everything’s cracking inside, everything’s packing up and ready to hit the road to leave this earthly stint behind, the head knows it, the films show it. There is more beer in the car even after these, there is more of the stiff and strong in the cabinet above the stove, the one with the door torn off and thrown into the dining room like kindling for this place’s final disappearing act. A plastic bottle shaped like a bear and filled with honey smashed into the counter in a fit of tics and sobs, all the sticky golden insides of the bear now going wrong just like Matthew’s guts. Bags of shit that was bought on larks, things that they were supposed to eat in front of fires in the fireplace or in front of love stories on the television screen, stupid bags of sweet, hard comfort that never came, all torn and smashed and thrown.

The head wonders for a minute why it is that every big,
dramatic, violent fit or fight in this body’s life has been so silent; gummy candy thrown, honey punched and smashed, yoga mats in giant stacks tumbling silently while soft hands pummel the soft pillow of fat on a man’s kind, warm back. The head fires up harder trying to think of better things to destroy, things that would make loud manly sounds, but no luck. And the gray stumbles into remembering that there is a gun around here now. One that presumably has bullets in it, one would assume based on the price and connection. So the tantrum of medium-grade destruction of honey bear and cabinet door could end in a loud smack, flash, and powder burn. A tight metal
click
-and-
bang
economy ticket to heaven, a quick end to this situation inside of him.

But the heart is having none of this, the chest is reminding the entire system that the gals in craft class are expecting Matthew; there is the matter of the mug for Jan, the matter of her middle-aged son, who likes
Pulp Fiction,
getting it and loving it regardless of Jan’s prediction that his wife will not. There is also the matter of a slip left on the door that says United Parcel Service is dropping by in the morning with two large parcels. And there is a lyric, rocketing in, in the quiet calm that comes after the, well, equally quiet destruction, a Steely Dan song that has not come up in the cerebral satellite shuffle before. It bears double-checking, but tonight—in the middle of this sticky mess of smashed bears and snacks that have been ripped from cupboards after the cupboards’ doors were quietly bent down and back and forth
on hinges that eventually broke—the little stanza sounds all about carrying on; about how minor worlds break apart but also fall together again; about how the demons won’t be at the door once morning comes repeated over and over in the head, from every angle, it seems there is not a downbeat loss to be found in it.

In the Morning, at the Door

M
ATTHEW’S DAYS ARE ADVANCING
without certain things happening, the scheduling of a follow-up appointment with the doctor who touches him and has terrible taste in political biographies, for instance. The denial has been thick enough to keep the delusion of reprieve alive and kicking, and then there was last night, which has landed squarely at this morning. Rocket from the bed and into the kitchen, and he keeps walking without looking behind him to see that he hasn’t made the bed and that the room is wrecked just like the kitchen. He has hidden the CT scan films, mostly from himself, between the wall and the stove in the kitchen. On the counter next to the stove, the white stone horizon is littered with tiny bear bodies; the contents of the honey bear’s head have thickened right where they
spilled out after his head exploded from the pounding. A crowd of gummy bears looks on, rubbernecking and milling about, staring down at their feet and feeling the weight of just how wrong things went for the honey bear, and if it happened to someone so much bigger, couldn’t it happen to them at any second?

Matthew steps over cabinet and cupboard doors, walks to the living room, and peeks from behind the curtain to make sure the UPS guy has jumped back into the truck and driven off before he creeps out on the porch quickly and recedes back into shadowy safety carrying the parcels left by UPS. Parcels that rested directly beneath a door slip signed and hanging there trying too hard to say something; to say that during the weekday hours between nine and seven, of course nobody would be here to sign for a package; why would they; why would someone be here when normal people are at work during that time; of course the recipient of the parcel of product ordered from a tiny classified ad in
American Crafting
wouldn’t be home—what, do you think he was fired or something? Well, he wasn’t.

Inside the house, Matthew opens the boxes and double-checks the order against the invoice with some scrutiny. After all, a business owner unaware of his inventory is not a business owner for very long. Two dozen (24 count) unfinished plaster mugs without graphics (Mug, LG16, nonfin/nonGFX) with no chips or damage, shipped UPS 2nd Day Air, paid in full by credit card. The mugs are each inspected,
each repacked with their respective ball of corrugated-cardboard packing wad, and the box is humped out to the Bavarian Motor Warehouse. The sleek, black, long, overpowered, aimless cockpit of denial and optimism is pointed toward the community center again. The brain keeps sending word down through the blood that something is wrong; that this is the wrong time of day to be leaving the house; that the dot on the film is winning whatever war it has waged; that a grown man is not supposed to be looking forward to an afternoon craft class with the craft ladies. But Matthew turns into the lot at the community center, suspending disbelief, at least for the moment—a rare gift for the semi-afflicted.

To the trunk to fetch the inventory; across the lot and in through the glass doors and down the hall; past the Take me! Take me! Take me! box where the book about data measuring continues to lie alone, filled with creased heartbreak and hopes of being taken home by some maligned and crushed soul in the kind of dire spiritual debt that drug and drink haven’t learned to solve yet; and finally, through the classroom door. Matthew cuts a direct line straight up to the box on the instructor’s desk, barely affecting the periphery of the chirpy, cooing craft covey. There it is. There’s the finished product. The words are as clear and as clean as Matthew recalls them having been:
God will help you find a gun if you’re grateful.
The illustration never really looked like a hand, and time and fire have not remedied this, but the gun is very plain to see in the illustration. It’s a gun held by a hand moving
so quickly it appears to have seven blurry fingers; a gun held in the hand of a burn victim—you can make fun of the hand portion of the illustration on the mug all day long, but one thing’s for sure: For fifteen bucks Jan’s son gets a sweet-ass mug with a gun on it, and a saying to buttress his faith.

The Business of This

F
IFTEEN DOLLARS FROM
Jan wadded and rolled and stuck into the pocket and the second it happened, adrenal corticoids raced fifteen thousand ideas right through the head. That was the moment all this sprung into consideration, this little production line that preps and glazes and fires under state supervision, then packs the mugs into the little white boxes. After the fifteen dollars created the explosion—the idea of making more mugs, and more little wads of dollars—there was a search online. It’s called The Norwalk Developmental Work Training Center, it turns out. There’s a video to click on. Matthew had heard about this place from Tim, of all people, years ago. Tim had said there was a place where people with physical limitations and so-called disorders enroll in a work-training program and are
supervised and authorized and certified; they do piecework assembly for your business. You drop stuff off, you pick it up assembled or gift-wrapped, or whatever. Tim didn’t explain as objectively as the Web site does, of course. Over drinks one time, Tim said something like, “There’s a huge factory full of retards up by where you live. People hire the place out for contract work. Just simple shit, though. When I worked at Solomon, we used them to stuff prospectus envelopes, but they eventually fucked a bunch up so we had to stop. They’d put keys and gum wrappers and shit like that in the envelopes—one had a nacho in it; just whatever the fuck catches their eye. They don’t know; you can’t get mad. But can you imagine that? You’re a client, we mail you a prospectus on a new fund and there’s a fucking nacho jammed in there?”

Anyway, Matthew went online, Matthew found the site, he clicked on the video, he got a stupid lump in his throat watching it, then he made a phone call and spoke with a guy named Jim, the executive director of the place, and the conversation went like this:

“So they’re coffee mugs basically?”

“Basically, yeah,” Matthew says.

“And you need some spot art, firing, then some packing. Okay, are we doing any fulfillment; any drop shipping to fulfill retail orders or anything?”

“I’m… Okay, there’s one thing. I’m not sure if the stuff I need put on them—the art I’ve come up with that I need replicated on the mugs—is too controversial for your… special, you know… for the people that…”

“For the twenty-eight- to fifty-year-old grown adults who work in our program?”

“Never mind, I know, I don’t think they’re… you know, I just…”

“So, we’ve reviewed your project and I’ve assigned Chris as your team leader.” Which is Jim’s way of saying,
Let’s move this along, shall we, you condescending idiot.

Chris has Down syndrome or a mild palsy or maybe both. He can turn around a case of mugs in a few days, in time for Matthew to try and sell them over a weekend. Since he’s a team leader, he decides how many staffers will help and everything. Today is maybe the third or fourth or seventh Friday that Matthew has made a pickup. It’s hard to tell what time is doing these days; days grind by in near halt like winter sap, and weeks fly by fast. But there are moments like this, Chris shaking, twisting, smiling, and trying hard to stay straight in his chair and not show a thing; to play it cool when Matthew comes around, to keep it all in, but it doesn’t work. Another batch of mugs, another Friday, another visit from Matthew—these are all things to twist and smile and make sounds about. And when his happiness peaks, you see it cross his mind to settle down, you see him admonish himself.

It’s hard on any heart watching; seeing him get mad at his body in a flash; seeing him trying to hide excitement the way the whole stupid, average world has mastered hiding excitement when life is trying to make them glad to be living.