Doubles (10 page)

 

Katie stood poolside again. This time she was in the dark, and I was behind her. I could barely see her as she lifted her dress. The fabric wadded up around her neck, revealing a headless torso in underwear. I looked around, terrified someone else might see. She struggled to release her arms. Finally her head popped out. She dropped the dress and dove. There was a tiny splash, a few droplets of water splattered onto my face, and for one moment I was the only one above ground. Then she surfaced, whipped her hair back, and said, “Come on.”

This was my coach’s wife.

And I was a married man.

“Slow.”

I took off my clothes in such a rush that I fell while pulling off my pants. Katie laughed, and when I finally got up and dove, her smile was so wide that, as I flew through the air, I saw her molars, small hidden pearlescent spots gleaming dimly in the back of her mouth.

The water hit me like an ice bath. I could barely catch my breath, inhaling sharply as I emerged. I drifted towards Katie, and when I was close enough that I could see her eyes reflecting the light from the clubhouse, I said, “I knew you were going to get in.”

“Don’t act like you know everything about me,” she said and put a hand on top of my head. She pushed down, and I let myself plummet, the blue darkening around me like a theater before a play. But the actors in this drama were Katie’s legs, kicking dark and mechanical before me. I watched them with as much wonder as anything on a real stage. When I surfaced, Jimmy Buffett was drifting thinly over the grass courts, through the grandstand, and over the water.

“I used to love this song,” Katie said.

“I know,” I said.

“Don’t act like you know everything about me,” she said again, softly, an afterthought. We floated in silence on our backs, listening to Jimmy Buffett and looking up at the stars, interspersed with blinking airplanes like bits of the firmament come to life.

After a while, I said, “You gonna tell me what you’ve been thinking about?”

She said nothing. I paddled with only one hand and spun myself in a slow circle.

“I’m sorry about you and Manny.”

“He’s an asshole.”

“He told me that he was emailing all those people and stuff.”

An airplane flew low in the sky above, its roar pressing down, lights blinking some urgent message. Katie swam to the small ladder on the side of the pool and hung on to the chrome rail. I grabbed the other side. She said, “You keeping up with Anne’s project?”

I nodded. “I got the nurse to shoot it while I was gone.”

“I’ve seen stuff like that do really well.”

“What does that mean?”

She held her hand into the air like it was an explanation. “If you keep doing it she could really have something when she wakes up.”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Whew,” she said. “That line always makes me nervous.”

I swung closer to her and caught her foot underwater. I placed it flush against my stomach and held it there, like a power source, some mystical hormone machine pumping extra blood into my veins. It was stupid and sexy. When she wiggled her toes it was like a bite on a long still line. Something rushed through me that hadn’t visited my system in ages. I put my other hand on her prickly calf, and a man yelled, “Cannonball!”

I turned towards the sound and saw backlit dreadlocks glowing lightly around their fuzzy edges. I let go of Katie’s foot as an explosion of water burst over us. Brah appeared at the surface, grinning and laughing.

“Couldn’t find you guys,” he said.

“Who are you?” Katie said.

“Brah.”

“Brah, could you leave us alone?” she said.

“Whoa,” he said, laughing. “You guys getting it on?”

“Yeah. We’re getting it on,” Katie said.

He swam to the ladder and turned, water pouring in a small stream from each dreadlock.

“Aren’t you married?” he said.

“Yeah. I’m married,” I said.

“Go,” Katie said. “Jesus.”

He put his hands in front of his face, as if he were warding off a wild animal, then backed away, into the darkness. We watched his silhouette grow smaller as he passed over the grass and disappeared.

“I hate that guy,” I said.

“He’s not the one you should hate,” Katie said.

“What do you mean?”

“Can I tell you something?”

That line did inspire terror. I started to laugh, but there was no humor on her face. She was serious. My chuckle faded to Jimmy Buffett, and then she told me who I should hate.

I exhaled and sank, the blue depth darkening like the show had just begun again after a long intermission.

AN OFF-BALANCE CEILING
fan wobbled around in the humidity. Manny sprawled across the tiny couch, spider limbs reaching halfway across the room. Without a shirt, his few chest hairs struggled off his protruding ribs and held themselves into the heat like sparse, wilting weeds.

“You remember how the vegetables in the Harris Teeter get sprayed with that automated mist?” he said. “Hey, I’m talking to you!”

I walked past him and into the bathroom, where I spit long strings of saliva into the bowl, waiting for vomit.

By the time I emerged, Manny had disappeared. I took his place on the couch, the cushions still warm from his massive frame. The dog jumped out the back window. I put my hands on my face and sighed. I was in the same position twenty minutes later, when Manny returned with a brown paper bag in each hand and a bundle of plastic tubing under an arm. He wore a sweat-soaked white tank top and one long strand of greasy hair drooped from his pompadour over an eye. His giant lips were stretched into a huge smile.

“Slow,” he said. “We’re going to be like those vegetables.”

“OK.”

“You alright?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t you want to know where I’ve been?”

I shrugged.

“Continental Carbonic.” He nodded his head. “Dry ice, my friend. Slow! What’s wrong with you?”

I watched like a zombie as he filled three cooking pots, his only cooking pots, with water, then placed them in the corners of the living room. He shook small white pellets out of the bags and, as they dropped, hissing, into the water, steam poured over the edges. The currents from the ceiling fan moved the mist in an undulating swirl across the hardwood floor, slowly parting around my ankles like a shifting carpet of cloud. Manny hung the tubes from hooks left in the ceiling for the ghosts of Katie’s hanging plants. He dropped the ends into the pots of dry ice. Steam then tumbled onto our heads, falling over our shoulders and finally meeting the undulating mass still hovering at the floor.

“I’m a vegetable,” Manny said. “Slow! What the fuck’s your problem? This is magic!”

I looked up at the wobbling fan and watched the indoor clouds land cold on my eyes, imaging what would happen if they froze and shattered, falling in pieces out of my face. My cell phone rang, and Manny said, “Yours, freak.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then picked up my phone. It was Kaz.

“Where’d you go?” he said.

The phone shook in my hand. I said, “Brah.” It was enough explanation.

“Manny have any more gobstopper?”

I looked at Manny, stretched out on the mini couch in his underwear, the dog draped across his lap.

“It’s gobstopper central,” I said.

Manny’s intercom had a small video screen on which you could see the person at the door. When Kaz buzzed, I watched the grainy image of him, shifting from foot to foot. His hair was still in that greasy
ponytail. I thought of the last grainy image of him I’d seen, dancing naked in my arms. I pushed ENTER.

“This safe?” Kaz said, stepping into the fog.

“Feel how it’s cooling things off?” Manny said.

“I gotta get some more of that medicine.”

“But seriously. Shit is cold, right?”

“No.”

“No gobstopper for you.”

“I played out of my mind today,” he said. “I got to do it again.”

“I’ll get it for you,” I said.

“Slow,” Manny said. But I knew where it was. In the refrigerator I’d seen a baby-food container with a skull and crossbones drawn on it. I recognized Manny’s handiwork. I took the container out and opened it. The stuff smelled like nothing. I filled a shot glass halfway.

“That’ll kill him,” Manny said, then took the glass from me. Over the sink he carefully poured it back into the skull jar without losing a drop. “Seriously.” He poured one small trickle into the cap of the jar. “Here.”

Kaz opened his mouth, and Manny poured in the capful.

“You want more?” I said.

Kaz nodded.

“I’m serious,” Manny said. “Any more will kill him.”

“I’m not going to kill him,” I said and opened the fridge.

“Hey!” Manny said and stood.

I took out the jar, unscrewed the lid, and refilled it.

Manny reached his wiry arm through the fog and smacked the cap out of my hand, sending gobstopper splattering through the indoor clouds.

“I don’t know what is wrong with you,” Manny said. “But you need to chill out. Right now.”

I sat on the miniature couch and stared at Manny’s Ouija board, propped against the wall beside a large pile of Westerns on VHS.

“Can you only talk to dead people through a Ouija board?” I said.

“You don’t have to be dead to have a spirit,” Manny said, still annoyed.

“Then let’s do it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

He was suddenly at ease, the gobstopper forgotten.

“Alright,” he said, giddy. “This shit is crazy. Seriously. You’re going to love it.”

He retrieved the board from behind the videos and spread it across the little coffee table. It covered the whole surface. It was the same Parker Brothers model that I’d had as a middle schooler, with the alphabet printed in gothic lettering above a YES and NO under a moon and sun.

“What are you doing?” Kaz said from the kitchen, where he was looking in cabinets.

“We’re going to talk to the spirit world,” Manny said.

“We’re going to talk to Anne,” I said.

Manny stopped in the middle of wiping something off the board and looked up.

“Whoa. OK. Now you guys have to keep an open mind,” he said. “I’ve been getting into this. I’ve been breaking through some barriers.”

I sat cross-legged on the floor.

“I don’t know,” Kaz said.

“Sit down,” Manny said.

We placed our fingertips on the plastic viewer.

“Lightly,” Manny said. “Easy.”

Kaz looked from Manny to me nervously, licking his gums.

“Anne,” Manny said. “It’s Manny and Kaz and Slow. Talk to us, girl.”

I waited, maybe more than a minute. The plastic thing sat motionless beneath our fingers. When the apprehension began to fade and Manny and Kaz showed the first signs of surrender—yawning and looking around—that was when I started to push.

Their faces slackened in amazement.

I stopped the viewer on the letter H, then moved.

I

“Holy shit,” Kaz whispered.

G

U

Y

S

“Holy
shit!
”

“Shhh,” Manny said.

“You pushing it?” Kaz said.

“No.”

“Seriously.”

“Shhh. No.”

The fog was too perfect. It rolled around our fingers, under the plastic viewer, and over the table edge. I let the silence play out. Then I pushed again.

T

E

L

L

H

I

M

“Tell who?” Manny said.

On this stage Kaz became the lead actor, his face falling into a comic visage of terror.

“Tell what?” Manny said. “Who tell what?”

I didn’t move it for quite a while this time, and unbelievably, the viewer actually moved on account of itself, that magical force of fingers and nervous energy that had blown middle school minds for decades. I let it drift around for a moment and wondered if Anne might actually try to take this odd mouthpiece over before I took charge again and spelled:

K

A

Z

“I swear to God, if you guys are pushing this,” Kaz whispered.

“We’re not pushing it,” Manny said.

“This is Anne,” I said.

“I don’t have anything to tell you,” Kaz said. “She must mean you tell me something.” But as he spoke, I began to move it again.

N

O

Y

O

U

K

A

Z

T

E

L

L

S

L

O

W

Kaz looked at me. He blinked rapidly, his pupils black holes beneath the fluttering eyelids.

A

B

O

U

T

All three of us leaned in, the last letters spelling, very slowly

U

S

Kaz took his fingers off the board and lay back, onto the floor.

“What the fuck?” Manny said.

“Why’d you give me that stuff?” he said.

“Focus, man,” Manny said. “Anne just asked you to do something.”

“Oh my God.”

“Hey,” I said. “Sit up.”

Kaz sat up.

“There something you need to tell me?”

Kaz looked at the board, the viewer still atop the S. He picked up the board and inspected it closely, flipped it over, then set it back down.

“I’m really fucked-up right now.”

“That’s OK,” Manny said. “Just go with it.”

“What was she talking about?” I said.