Farewell Navigator (3 page)

Listen to this, she says. This is marvelous. Dragons have such peculiar diets! The seafaring ones eat starfish only. The ones in caves eat bats and mold. And the meadow-dwellers are thought to survive entirely on honey bees!

Amazing, I say.

Amazing, she agrees.

THE EVERYTHING HATER

My brother has enrolled in a writing class at the community center and says the other students make him want to kill himself and one day soon, he warns us, he probably will. Our mother laughs, but tells me to keep an eye peeled. My duties as the non-suicidal child include frequent phone calls and unannounced visits. I call frequently, and if he doesn’t answer I call back until he does. I drive over to his apartment and stay an hour or two, coughing on his smoke, listening to crackly records whose brilliance he says I don’t appreciate.

There is often a pile of dishes crusting next to the sink. Not
in
the sink, because Horace needs the sink for watering and draining his large pots of decorative nightshade. You don’t have to, he might say feebly, as I turn the taps, to which I reply, It’s not a big deal, because it isn’t, after all, a big deal to soap and rinse a few cups. So why doesn’t he wash them himself? I accuse my mother of raising a boy who can’t do his own dishes and of raising a girl who feels obliged to do them. Don’t give me that, she says, did you check the bathroom? and I nod and say, Just mouthwash! because it would not ease her mind to tell her what is in my brother’s medicine cabinet.

What are you writing about for your class? I ask when the
plates are dripping on the rack, September wind pushing the panes, night ready to fall.

Some bullshit, he says.

Story or poem?

You could call it a story, he says, if you were feeling generous.

About what?

You’re asking the wrong question, he says, pressing his finger down on a little spider inching across the stacked guitar cases that serve as a coffee table. Die, die, my darling, he whispers before announcing, A salt-worthy story isn’t
about
something—it is that something itself.

Then what is the something that your story is?

Bullshit, my brother replies.

If he happens to be in a good mood, he will ask me a question or two. How is my sell-out job? Have I found a boyfriend yet or is there no man alive under the age of fifty willing to go to bed with me at ten
P.M.
? Do I derive satisfaction from my sellout job? Do I remember that I used to be creative, back in childhood when I made dolls out of pebbles and felt? Can I lend him eighty dollars? Does Mom consider him pathetic? Would Dad have considered him pathetic? If eighty’s too steep, how about sixty?

When his mood is not good, he goes on choked tirades about the other students in his writing class. Do I understand the ridiculousness of these people? They have experienced
nothing
of life. They are naive, dull-witted, they are sheep blinking in the glint of the blade—which is to say, he explains, they can’t think for themselves and have no idea the government’s hand hangs poised to slit their chubby throats.

Is that a metaphor? I ask.

No, Horace says.

And the students’ writing is so bad—so appallingly, devastatingly bad—the word
wretched
springs to mind and their puny efforts to sound deep fail so miserably the word
failure
is actually charitable and my brother can’t figure out why a single one of these people chose to pick up a pen in the first damn place. It’s not as if they have talent. It’s not as if they have anything, and Horace means
anything
, to say.

Maybe they just like to write, I suggest.

My brother wants to know how you can possibly enjoy doing something at which you suck.

We are nothing for Halloween. In sweatpants, I mix a batch of cookie dough and set the bowl on the couch with two spoons. In sweatpants, Horace comes over with beer, his skull ashtray, and horror movies from Slick Flix where Duke, his sometimes friend, works. He and Duke are speaking at the moment, which means free videos. But the first movie,
Cuddle of Death
, has to be turned off after five minutes because its soundtrack includes a song by a band whose singer used to sing, years ago, in Horace’s band. Not only is the song horrendous, my brother says, but can I imagine the agony of listening to caca from the anus of a talentless hack who was once just like Horace (poor and unknown) but now never has to work a day in his life?

Instead of putting in another movie, he opens another beer and starts complaining about his writing teacher. She is too loose with her praise. She says stories are interesting when they’re not. It makes these people think they have
potential
, he says. She bats those big yellow eyes and goes,
Interesting
. But it’s not! Sex in dorm room: not interesting. White boy traveling in Morocco: not interesting. Old age home: not interesting,
depressing
, unless you make something cool happen, such as mutiny. Patients bludgeoning nurses with walkers, etc.

The bell buzzes. Horace yells,
Après moi
, the razor blades! and I go for the door. Two ghosts and a scary clown hold out plastic pumpkins. I drop a bag of gumdrops into each pumpkin. Thank you, they say without enthusiasm.

You’ve got boring candy, Horace tells me. Those kids are out there right now talking shit about you.

And my degree of caring about that is . . . ?

Higher than you’re willing to let on. You secretly wish you could give them something badass, like miniature guns that shoot chewable bullets. But all you have is piano-teacher candy.

Dad liked gumdrops, I point out.

And you greatly honor his memory by distributing them to pissed children. He had bad taste, face it. He liked bow ties and soft rock. He liked
Mom
, for god’s sake! Horace crushes out a dwindled cigarette on the teeth of the skull.

When the beer is gone, cookie-dough bowl licked to gleam, he is still fretting about the singer. It’s just
stupid
, he repeats. How did that band get on a
soundtrack?

It’s only
Cuddle of Death
, I reason. It never even came out in theaters.

Yeah, but.

I yawn and he goes to my refrigerator to see if there might be any beer he didn’t notice before.

Our parents were the same height—they matched. They traded off reading us bedtime stories, and neither minded reading the same story again and again. Either could fix a fine egg-and tomato sandwich on short notice. Our mother was better at dancing and driving, and our father had a better sense of humor. Our mother was good at comforting our father when he cried, all those nights when he sat on the couch holding his
cheeks, weeping, grunting, shaking his head, and she told us to go to our rooms. Whenever we asked was Dad all right, Mom would say, Sure, goslings, he’s just feeling sad today.

After his funeral, we moved from the city to a town so tiny we were able to count its stoplights on two hands. This town is small but not quaint or friendly. The first time Horace got charged with a drunk and disorderly, in front of one of the two local bars, policemen held his face against a brick wall and tapped the back of his head with a flashlight.

We do this a little harder, one cop said, guess what happens to your brains? Smash-o! and the other cop laughed.

Smash-o?
Horace repeated afterward, with disdain. What the fuck kind of word is that?

I watched him fiddle with the gauze reddening on his cheek and forehead. It’s hard to get bandages to stay fixed on a mouth, so his broken-open lips just went ahead and bled.

Feel like making out? he asked, lurching at me.

Our mother worries first about self-harm and second—a close second—about the fact that Horace refuses to work. Her daughter, at least, has a job, the same job for several years running, even if it’s not a very interesting one. Her son hasn’t had a job in a year and a half, and she is getting a bit tired,
frankly
, of supplementing the income he makes from selling blood. He sells it as often as they let him, but blood money doesn’t go too far. Neither does the cash he gets from being a volunteer for medical tests that turn his feces white. Mom pays most of his bills and I accuse her of gross enabling.

Better to enable than have him move back in with me, she answers. That really took its toll.

She likes us to attend Sunday dinner at her house, because it reminds her of television shows where families eat together
on Sundays with gusto and ceremony. Ladling sauced beef onto macaroni, she asks how our respective weeks have gone.

Horace spears a finger of meat and lifts it up for inspection.

I announce, They might put me in charge of planning the new vacation-package campaign.

That’s great, goose. To where?

Central Asia.

Horace burbles, An enchanting travel destination, to be sure. All the crime, the heat, and the outdoor plumbing you could ask for! What’s your brochure gonna say—
Visit Kyrgyzstan, because it’s cheaper than Belgium?

I, for one, am proud of you, Mom says. It’s an exciting opportunity.

If you want exciting, says my brother, you should’ve seen my class this week. Man, I’m telling you—the action never stops. First we’ve got a roller-coaster ride of a story entitled “The Final Waltz,” the heartwarming saga of a woman who slow dances with her Alzheimer’s-ravaged husband. Really innovative material, and so freshly imagined—nary a cliché in sight! Next we’re treated to the joy of “Oops I Did It Again and Again,” a comical look at twenty-four hours in the life of a teenage slut. How many lacrosse players do you reckon a girl can pleasure in twenty-four hours? Mom, you first.

Horace,
please
.

No, no, come on, give it a go. Two? Five? Ten? Nay,
eleven
this girl manages. The narrator informs us, in no uncertain terms, that such promiscuity is the result of low self-esteem and an absent father. I like a story that spells out its message, don’t you? Not quite as subtle as a greeting card, perhaps, but—Fortunately for all, we had our esteemed instructor on hand to lead us in the critique. Know what she said? Know what she told the jellyfish brain who wrote that tale? He slurps another
beef slice off his fork.
The way you describe her crouching alone in the janitor’s closet, pulling her panties back up, is very moving
.

Maybe it was, I say.

And maybe I am the next Joyce J. Beckett.

Mom asks, What has she said about
your
stories?

Nothing.

Why not?

Because I have turned none in. I haven’t been inspired to finish anything. The instructor is not what you’d call inspiring. More like
aspiring
. To be what, I couldn’t say. While the rest of us are slowing
expiring
from lack of—

Shall we change the subject? says Mom.

And I forgot to tell you, there’s going to be a reading. In, like, early December. The last week of class.

Oh! That’s lovely. Are your sister and I invited? Mom’s face creaks with the same terrible optimism it did when Horace told her Duke had gotten him a job at the video store. She had no way of knowing my brother would last a total of three days at Slick Flix.

Family and friends, apple juice and cheddar nips, the
works
. The yellow-eyed queen of false encouragement wants us to share our literary bounty with those we love.

On Thanksgiving morning, once the turkey’s in, we watch Mom make sweet-potato pie. It was Dad’s favorite. He composed a song to sing while it baked: Yammy, yammy, golden yammy, tell me why you taste so yummy. Every Thanksgiving since he died, one of us has sung it instead. It’s an embarrassing song and no longer even reminds me of my father. I associate the yams with Horace’s amplifier, which exploded the year he tried to accompany my voice with electric guitar. The amp blew out on the first
yummy
and a wire of sparks flew across the air
and our mother screamed so hard she began to hyperventilate. Horace stalked off to his room—he was living at home that year—to smoke a bowl, leaving me to get our mother breathing again.

Whose turn is it? Mom asks, sliding the pie onto the rack above the turkey.

I have a sore throat, says Horace.

That must make you a little
hoarse
, I say.

They stare back at me.

Get it? Horace—hoarse—
get
it?

Got it, unfortunately, my brother says.

The night of the first Thanksgiving after we moved to the town of few stoplights, he was pulled over at three in the morning. One cop circled the car, dragging the nose of his gun against its sides, while the other cop prepared a breathalyzer.

Can you, um, not do that? Horace said.

The cop kept walking very slowly around the car. The gun squeaked along the metal. Horace took his mouth off the nozzle and said, You’re gonna scratch it!

The cop didn’t stop.

Please, my brother said, it was my dad’s car.

The cop lifted the gun so it was pointing at Horace. You think your dad wanted you driving drunk in this car?

He wouldn’t have minded, declared my brother, as long as I was driving
well
.

Our mother stands still at the sink, hands in apron pockets.

Pie smells good, I say.

What? Oh. . . . She shakes her staring eyes away from the window and says, Where did your brother go?

Upstairs. He said he needed to take a nap.

It’s eleven
A.M.

Want me to check?

Mom says, I’m just trying to remember what’s in my medicine cabinet.

He’s got plenty of his own, I want to tell her.

He’s a bluffer, I want to say.

Why don’t you check, she nods. And I’ll baste the carcass.

I knock on the door of the room that was Horace’s for the last two years of high school and again after college until our mother kicked him out. Hor, I call. Hor-house! Hello? Are you dead in there?

No reply.

I’m coming in, I say, so cover yourself.

And I open the door.

It’s not like the time three years ago, when he got close enough for an ambulance ride (pills). Not like a year ago, when he didn’t get close at all (pills again, but too many; he vomited them up). Not like this past summer, when he didn’t appear to be trying very hard—knifed his wrists the wrong way and they didn’t bleed enough.