Four New Messages (2 page)

And the car his mother left behind precipitated Mono’s fight with his father—when the professor began dating a former student or began publicly dating her. She’d brought the largest veggie stix ’n’ dip platter to the gathering after the funeral.

She was also from Yerevan—super young and super skinny and tall with curly red hair curled around a crucifix that oscillated between the antennal nipples of her breasts—and as long as we’re confusing ourselves with chronology, she was just two years older than Mono.

His mother’s ailing Ford became his because his father already had a convertible.

Then one afternoon his father asked, Could you lend Aline your car for the day? She wishes to consolidate her life before the moving.

Mono said he said nothing.

His father tried again, Could you drive her yourself, to assist with the boxes?

Mono explained:

That was his father’s way of telling him that Aline was coming to Cali.

My mother’s car? Mono finally asked.

But you can forget about Aline. She’s pregnant with Mono’s half brother in Palo Alto and this is her last appearance.

At the time Mono’s name was not yet Mono. That name was as new as Berlin.

Like
monolingual,
he’d said when we shook hands (his hand was sweaty).

Whereas the surname he’d been given was much more distinctively foreign. Not that he was supposed to divulge that name to his customers—to them, until he ruined himself, he was only
Dick.

To get him to loiter outside your dorm or stand around licking fingers to count bills on the rickety porch of an offcampus sorority, you dialed Methyl, who’d say, He be calling a minute before he shows. Name of Dick.

Dick
would usually show up within a half hour and though he was supposed to only get paid and leave, he never followed Methyl’s instructions.

Instead he’d play older brother, stacking used plastic cups, making troughs of new ice, holding class presidents steady upsidedown for kegstands, reveling in free drinks and ambient vagina until recalled to work with a vibrating msg: NW6, say (Trenton’s North Ward location six, where he’d make the night’s next pickup—Methyl didn’t trust anyone out with more than three deliveries at a time).

Dick
stayed out later the later in the night he was called and so on a 3 AM delivery to a party that had run out that a colleague,
Rex,
had delivered earlier that evening, a party pumping for six or seven hours already through music playlists both popularly appropriate and someone’s stepdad’s collection of Dylan bootlegs and whose mixer juices and tonics had been exhausted,
Dick
would not be moved, especially not when a girl—the same girl who’d called Methyl, who’d told his deliverer to expect a female customer—threw arms around him and said:

They sent
you
this time!

Dick,
who prided himself on remembering all his customers, couldn’t be sure whether this girl, Em, was pretending to remember him or just wasted—and this should have been his first warning.

The couch, the absorbent couch, furniture in appearance like a corkscrew coil of shit—brown cushions, black backing worn shiny—soaking in the boozy spill and smoke of years, intaking fumes and fluids through the spongy membrane of its upholstery. They sat there, he and this girl who knew him only as
Dick
—this townie fake gownie and though he didn’t know it yet the daughter of a Midwestern appliances manufacturer who maintained, this daughter did, upward of thirty anonymous weblogs:
Stuff to Cook When You’re Hungover, Movies I Recently Saw About Niggers, My Big Gay Milkshake Diary, The Corey News
(which warned of the depredations of child stardom),
What I’ve Heard About Bathrooms in North America
—all irregularly updated but all updated.

They sat doing lines—is that my line? that’s your line? this line’s mine—and all was weightlessly intimate until Em turned to him and said:

This is from yours right?

Dick
didn’t answer immediately so she asked again.

This is on you?

Dick
said, Sure.

Sure?

Whatever. We’ll figure it out.

Em said, No not whatever. No figuring. Say it for me!

He felt like he had to stop himself from peeling her lips off her face as if they were price stickers, like they were designer labels as she said again:

Say it for me! This is your supply.

He said, This is
your supply.

Em smiled.

OK, this is my shit. This shit is mine.

And she laughed and said, Dick! I’m so glad they sent you!

And he said, Actually only people who work for me call me Dick. My name’s really Rich.

Rich?

Richard.

Rich hard what?

I’d show you my license, if I had it.

He’d been craving this opportunity to brag.

I was jumped last month in Philly, rival dealers, took my narcotics and wallet (a lie: he’d been drugfree on his way to a bartending job interview, the muggers barely pubescent, three kids as stubby as their switchblades).

You don’t carry ID?

He reached into a pocket, found his passport, passed it around.

Em flipped through it, Did you enjoy Mexico?

I went with my parents.

You were an ugly child.

Discussions were: over changing the music and so changing the mood, about what band was good or bad in which years and with which personnel—is playing the bass harder than it looks? does a true leadsinger have any business playing guitar?

Anyway what kind of person would say which—
personnel
as opposed to
lineup? leadsinger
as opposed to
frontman?

Is this coke cut? is all coke cut? and how is that not the same as
lacing?

What innocents they were,
Dick
thought—the purity was theirs, not the drug’s.

This one guy said, There was this girl I used to go out with who was the transitional girlfriend of a kid who starred in like every fucking movie.

Who was it? the party wanted to know, what every fucking movie was he in?

The guy told them.

Famous right? crazy crazy famous? Girls saved his face into screensavers, produced ringtones out of his voice. She was with him for three months off and on. Then I was with her and after our third or fourth date we had sex and you know what she said to me after?

What?

She said:
Peter, before you having sex was just like staring at the ceiling.

Like what?

Again:
like staring at the ceiling.

And that night that coital praise became an inside joke, like, whatchacallit, a party trope.

When someone went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and retrieved another beer for you it was, Before you drinking beer was just like staring at the ceiling, when someone tapped out a thick fat line for you with their parents’ Platinum Plus Visa card on the glass slab tiered above the baize bottom of the house’s threequartersize poker table it was, Before you coke was just like staring at the ceiling, then that prefatory endearment was dropped with the tense and it was only, This couch is just like staring at the ceiling, This floor is just like staring at the ceiling, This ceiling’s just like staring at the ceiling.

You had to be there but you’re lucky you weren’t.

Somebody left to buy the ingredients to bake a pie, somebody left to buy a pie, somebody left.

Cakes v. pies were debated, cupcakes v. muffins were too, the salient differences between them, the identities of the world’s greatest lacrosse players were discussed, various names proposed both at the college level and pro. Pressing questions asked and answered: What’s more degrading, working as a stripper or working as a maid? What’s the best position to have re: Iran—preemptive strikes or sanctions inevitably targeting women and children? What’s the best sexual position for virginity loss—for a man, for a woman, for a child? Is there a future for campaign finance reform after the veritable abortion of
Citizens United v. FEC?
If you could repeal any amendment to the Constitution, which (no one allowed anymore to pick the first ten, whichever amendment repealed Prohibition, or the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth)? If you were a fart, what type (how wet, what smell)? Ten Most Mortifying Moments? Most egregious party foul? If you could describe your entire life in only one word to only one dead grandparent, which grandparent and what word?

Etc.

Mono’s apartment had been advertised as a one bedroom but having remitted the deposit he admitted to himself, why not, it was a studio. What the realtor maintained made it a one bedroom was a small little nothing nook by the door so minuscule that whenever Mono wanted to open the door he had to move the television onto the bed. His TV slept better than he did. The door’s peephole had been blackened for a robbery. The window opposite gave onto parkinglot, he never kept it open, gas. On the floor, lotto stubs, scratchers he’d scratch with teeth. Underlabeled whiskey under the label. Flies at the bottom of a liter of cola. In the bathroom clothing hung from the showerhead smelling alternately feculent and moldy. The sink was mustached with shavings. He’d been using takeout napkins as toiletpaper for a month. The sounds he’d hear by morning were those of mice the size of his pinky sprayed newborn from the walls or, once, the whining die of the smokedetector’s batteries. The apartment had no light because the bulbs had burnt out and he never remembered to replace them. Anyway Mono was rarely home at night and the television was enough light and the computer was sufficient too.

Mono was ISO work. He was perpetually interviewing and applying himself to applications because what’s life for a man in the middle?

Interrupting binges where if you didn’t have what they wanted you yourself weren’t wanted.

Only feared.

Meeting people furtively but trying to be kind. Yet having that kindness misinterpreted.

I don’t care what you think about the Yankees’ outfield, one kid said, I just want my fucking drugs.

Yankee wants his fucking drugs? Mono unsure of what to say.

The kid apologized.

Accidental, his initial involvement. Mono had begun delivering when he began owing Methyl money—short one night on an eightball he was supposed to have split before a food court coworker bailed (that one week Mono worked at Quaker Mall).

He knew he had to get out when this past New Year’s down the shore at a condo shuttered for the season a fierce former valedictorian who’d strolled with him along the snowy beach had said, Let’s continue this conversation some other time—a convo about renewable energy—like when I’m sober and you’re not my dealer.

Mono had had sex with her lesbian friend that night: she was stretchmark mangled, solicitous. She’d feigned abandon, collapsed on the bed, but just when Mono wanted to fall asleep she went to the bathroom to brush teeth, which was tender. The next morning she picked his jeans up from the floor and turned the pantlegs rightside out while Mono repositioned the pair of athletic socks in his jacket’s breastpocket—an advertisement for his packing a gun. That was the only time he’d had sex this year.

The résumé he’d been sending around he’d falsified: his experience including six months as executive assistant in a film production company he’d created, a year as a consultant to a pharmaceutical consulting firm for whose HR hotline he gave his own phone, figuring he could talk drug distribution with the best—while his other references tended toward the suspiciously familial: his cousin who’d developed a dating website and was too lazy busy getting laid to pick up the phone, another cousin who did the ordering for but did not own as Mono had stated Trenton’s North Triangle Liquors—though when it came to education he demurred: granting himself only a B.A. if cum laude, supplemented vainly by a Dean’s Award in English.

Despite this, he’d become inured to rejection: Never called back by that Suburban Poverty Task Force that needed someone with a liberal arts background to disorganize their archives, bend paperclips into helicopters and swans. Refused by that talent management agency requiring a front office rep. (he was overqualified, they qualified). A limousine driver, a limo dispatcher (ditto). Each being the juniormost position each business offered.

Monday punctually at noon the phone rang and Mono answered and a voice said, Mr. Monomian (the pronunciation was passable), I’m calling from Skilling Militainment Solutions.

Mr. Skilling, Mono said.

There is no Skilling. This is O. J. Muggs, recruiter, ret. capt. Marines.

Mono, sitting up in bed, said, Sir.

I’m afraid we can’t offer you the position.

You can’t? The position? But I haven’t even been interviewed.

You won’t be. This does not constitute an interview. Please say yes, indicating your understanding.

No I don’t understand.

Don’t fool yourself, son. Not even civilians are exempt from civility. Security isn’t just armed convoys, it’s also a sound reputation.

What’s unsound about my reputation?

What you do in private is your business, until it becomes public, and then it’s your employer’s business, especially if your employer’s employed by the government of the United States. War’s all about image—and effective chaplaincy and counterinsurgency.

Come again?

You need to clear your profile, son.

My profile, what about it?

Your presence, you need to clean your presence.

I’m not following, and Mono canvassed his apartment, wondering whether the man had a camera focused on him or was just intuitive.

The internet, Muggs said, are you aware of your internet?

Mono was not aware of his internet. He’d never made a habit of googling himself—it was too depressing a venture.

Previously his life had passed undetected by bots. His life too modest for hits, too meek for the concerns of blogpostings and tweets.

Mono had always taken such paucity personally—virtual presence being, to him, presence nonetheless.