Hot Pink (2 page)

I pass the book on to Mom. She skims it. Then she throws it in the fire.

My father—like Nobel, I'd like to think—becomes fatalistic. His creativity gets blocked.

He locks himself in the attic laboratory and bleats, and sometimes there are smashing sounds. He can't figure out how to make a paste that starts out smelling good, ends up smelling bad, and corrodes the mini-tract all the while. He drinks, fights with Mom. He becomes impotent. Mom, in her loneliness, has made of me a reluctant confidant is how I know that. She and I start scarfing pints of ice cream together at midnight. I get cavities, she gets heavy. All of us dread dinner. Dad comes to the table and refuses to eat, saying, “I don't deserve it, I don't deserve your food,” while Mom looks to me for shrugs of allied contempt. Our father gets so skinny, the neighbors start talking cancer. We let them talk, fearful that any sympathy they might have for us will lessen if they find out he's insane. We despise him and we don't even fear him.

What makes it worse is how so much of his falling apart gets realized through the attempts he makes to put himself back together. Like some pop-eyed Manson Family ascetic, he invents rules about watching television. For example: he must change the channel once and only once every ten minutes, whether or not a commercial is on. Next it's his bowels: he has to sit on the toilet from 9:30 a.m. to 9:50 a.m. and cannot sit on the toilet at any other time of day, regardless of his needs. Every morning at eleven, he plugs the bathroom sink and fills it with near-scalding water, then plunges the first joint of his pinkie in, holds it there for thirty seconds, and doesn't breathe. He's no fool, my dad. He knows he's making self-destructive gestures and, worse than that, he knows that nearly scalding your pinkie is a half-assed way to go about self-destruction. One morning, I come across him in the hallway outside the bathroom and he puts his arm around me, says, “Mike, your dad's a pussy. A real pussy.”

Brian, at the bottom of the stairs, overhears this. “Yeah!” he yells up. “And a fuckface, too. You want to slap me, now, Mike, you scrawny bitch? I don't forget.”

Dad says, “Son.”

Brian says, “What? You're gonna protect him?” Then he skims a ninja star at the ceiling and tears the stair carpet with a bowie knife.

By the third year of his inventor's block, Dad can't find the deep end he'd otherwise go off of and he becomes obsessed with the origin of the phrase, convinced that
deep end
refers to the deep end of a pool, which is not a thing he can reconcile with off-ness or on-ness. It's all he talks about, if he talks at all. He doesn't show up at the dinner table anymore. He plucks a rusted chain-mail blouse from a dumpster by the theater and wears it all day without an undershirt, eye-droppers lemon juice onto his chest before bed. One afternoon, he bites a small chunk of flesh off the back of his left hand and, every succeeding afternoon, rips the scab off with his teeth, then breaks out the dropper and does the raw red derm like it was his nipples.

On the eve of my brothers' last day as sophomores, Claudia Berman rings the bell. They barrel down the stairs and Brian trips on the way and says Timmy tripped him. Timmy makes for the front lawn and Brian puts a tackle to Timmy's knees, flips him over, and starts whaling on his face. I run outside to pull the skull-sapper out of Brian's calf-sheath while Timmy, spouting purple from the nose and mouth, Brian's forearm pressed against his trachea, flails his arms around, trying to get hold of something. He gets Brian's ear. The left one. It comes off. Brian falls backward, on top of me, holding his earhole, bleeding less than I'd expect. Claudia screams Timmy's name and runs inside for towels.

It's the end of Brian's alpha. It's the end of Timmy's optimism. It's the end of a lot of things.

Dad takes bedding to the attic and sleeps on a slab.

Mom hits the local singles bars on Fridays.

Months pass.

Brian's prosthetic ear—which the insurance company covers only half the cost of, thus engendering the misappropriation of tuition for my first year of college and destroying, once and for all, any false hopes I might have had of getting even a used Kia—starts coming loose on cold days and finally falls plum off after the Winter Formal Dance, while he's walking to an Inspiration Point–bound Chevy with Claudia, for whom he knows he's consolation meat. I graduate high school, turn eighteen years old, and when I try to enlist in the Coast Guard, they won't have me. As I walk out of the recruiting office, the guy who'd been queued up behind me calls me a homo and I pretend not to hear because no one cares what I do anyway. Timmy wears all black all the time and, with hot irons and scalpels stolen from Dad's lab, he mutilates his thighs and lower abdomen to absolve his guilt about Brian's ear, which Brian keeps milking, the guilt. Mom starts dating a rhubarb farmer from Kenosha, telling me about it. She says he's gentle, and clubfooted, but he loves her.

Our life, by this time, has become a cartoon. Maybe it's an X-rated cartoon, and maybe it would seem more real if, in my bumbling, fleshy way, I weren't trying so hard to make a prime-time morality play of it, but still: if on a certain moonlit evening in Arizona, I'd seen my mother drop off a cliff and go SPLAT, I doubt I'd be very surprised to find her cooking eggs in our kitchen the following morning. Rather, I'd be surprised to find her cooking, but if she were standing beside the stove, chewing her nails or talking to herself, I'd only squint a little before I believed it. And yes, it's true that
The Catcher in the Rye
took ten years to write and no one's cured cancer yet, but a Barbie with a working digestive system? We let him turn us into Looney Tunes for a high-concept doll?

On my nineteenth birthday, Dad hands me the card-stock receipt for a six-month subscription to
Hustler
, a block of two-by-four, and a tube of vitamin-enriched protein paste. He invites me into the lab and sits me down before a lathe-drill, props the two-by-four under the bit. Hand on the grip, eyes engoggled, he tells me, “You're eighteen now. It's about time you and your dad had a talk about girls and technology.”

“Okay,” I say.

“They don't go together,” he says. “Look at me, Mike. Do you see?”

I look at him. He looks sick. He looks embarrassed. A pearl of saliva is drying whitely in the cleft of his chin. He smells like Mad Dog and burned plastic.

“I hate you,” I tell him.

“I hate me, too,” he says.

I start crying, which is pretty typical.

“It's nothing to cry about, kiddo. Well, maybe it is. But wouldn't it be a whole lot worse if I thought I was a good man? It would be irresponsible. It would lack rigor.”

He aligns the drill. When he moves, the chainmail against his chest-skin makes a noise like velcro. He picks at his scabs, forgets I'm there with him.

“What do you want, Dad?”

He snaps to, coughs something up and swallows it.

“Manage a restaurant,” he says. “Sell insurance. Harvest rhubarb like that Swedish guy. For chrissakes, though, don't try to battle eating disorders with new technologies. Don't create systems. Describe systems. The ideal doll is a girl, so don't bother making dolls or trying to improve girls. I'll tell you what. I'm not God. I'm not even any kind of Frankenstein. When you were born I bawled my eyes out because I knew I couldn't do better. And then the twins. Them, too. But not a daughter. Never had one. How can I describe a girl if I've never had a daughter?”

“I'm gay.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“It's got nothing to do with sense.”

“Well, either way, I got you the wrong subscription. And I've fastened the wrong drill bit. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“Is he nice to you? I mean, does he treat you well?”

“He's okay.”

“I suppose I've never met him because you're embarrassed to bring anyone to the house… Listen. Don't settle for a bunch of nonsense. You're better than that. I don't deserve to have you as a son. You're a shining example of goodness and tolerance and I'm this crazy piece of shit over here. I'm trouble. It's a privilege to even be despised by you—”

“Dad.”

“Ditch that boyfriend and find yourself a good one. Adopt a baby girl. Teach kindergarten. Don't worry about humanity. Love
humans
, boy-o, be close to them. Let humanity work things out for itself. You'll be a happy man. You know you enliven me? You're an endless well of hope!”

He drapes his arm over my shoulders, squeezes. “Do you think you were born gay, or was it the way you were raised?”

“Born,” I say.

Then, as suddenly as Kekule's snake became a benzene ring, Dad theoretically solves the problem of the smell of paste. His face twitches.

“Son of mine!” he says. “My son!”

He figures out that changing the makeup of the paste isn't the answer, but that copper-coating small portions of the plastic joints in the mini-tract will cause the digested paste—in its present form—to stink up real bad upon its regurgitation or elimination, and now all he has to work out is (1) how to push forth the hairs in the follicles in the Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips that he's embedded in the rubber over Bonnie's upper lip and below her navel, and (2) how to trigger them at the appropriate time, i.e., when Bonnie becomes “anorexic.”

To actually sprout the hairs, it's a simple matter of activating microgram weights and polymer pulleys not dissimilar to those used in the mini-tract system. As for the situation-appropriate triggering of the sprouting activation, Dad decides to plant a function on a microchip, the workings of which are a little bit beyond me, but entail the delicate balancing of a paste-intake equation with a limb-movement equation. A large enough imbalance translates to “anorexia” and, depending on the degree of the imbalance, commands certain weights to shift and certain pulleys to pull so that one or both of the embedded Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips can do what they were made to do.

Now it's only a matter of time.

One summer evening three months later, our family, minus Dad, plus the limping rhubarb farmer, is eating barbecue at the picnic table in the backyard. Brian sits to the right of Timmy, and whenever Timmy speaks Brian says, “Who's talking? I know I heard a voice, but for some reason I can't tell where that voice is coming from. Funny,” he says, “I can't seem to tell where just about any sound I hear comes from.”

It's cooling down outside. A rabbit chases another rabbit until he catches her on the cement patio and they have sex until they become distracted, at which point they stop and stare at the sky and become distracted and start having sex. Moths bang their heads on lamps. Squirrels chew. Mosquitoes wobble. Fireflies incandesce.

The farmer's wearing a checked bow tie. He's had his shoes and socks off since he lit the grill, and Mom keeps admiring how “brave” and “open” he is for showing off the naked lump. Cutting into some sausage, he asks me if I'm interested in doing man's work, and Mom, bouncing in his lap so her jowls sway, leans toward me, karate-chop hand at the side of her mouth. She chokes down potato salad and stage-whispers, “Olaf has big plans for you. He's a man of
ideas
.” The farmer's eyebrows rise and fall, rise and fall.

“I'm a homosexual,” I tell the table.

The farmer says, “Why do you want to go and say something like that at dinner?”

Timmy raises his fork over his head and jams it into the soft side of his own elbow. Misses the arteries. He twists the fork, then pulls it out of his arm and reaches across the table, directing the thing at the farmer. Tines drip blood onto Olaf's sausage. Timmy says, “Don't threaten my brother, Olaf.”

“Who said that?” Brian says.

Olaf says, “I wasn't threatening no one, young man.”

Timmy drops the fork. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I misunderstood.” Sucking on his arm, he steps out of his sandals. He goes to the patio and starts kicking it hard, toes first. The rabbits keep pumping.

“Oh, Timmy,” Mom says.

“That's the kind of thing,” Olaf says. “That temper of yours. Your boy's temper,” he says to Mom. “That's the kind of thing lost your other boy his ear, now isn't it.” Olaf establishes eye contact with Brian in what seems to be a gesture of solidarity.

Brian says, “Don't pity
me
, you milky fucken lame.”

We're quiet for a minute, plate-gazing. It's on me to break the silence.

I tell them, “I'm okay with myself.” I tell them, “I believe the world is mostly good, a self-repairing blemish on the face of God, an open system moving away from chaos, toward organization. I believe that each of its many seemingly awful components are essential to its betterment and will, in distant, perfect retrospect, be understood as wholly functional.” I'm in the middle of telling them, “To hate him requires us to hate ourselves and we don't need to hate ourselves, we can have a little faith,” when there is a cracking sound and Olaf's head smacks the table and Mom screams and Brian stands and Timmy crawls back to us and I look up to see Dad, free of stage armor, holding a blood-covered Bonnie by the waist. The blood is Olaf's. The victory is Dad's. He raises the doll, high, over his head.

It's the first time we've seen her with all her skin on. Dad tosses her to me, and when I catch her against my chest, she nearly undoes the scoop of my arms.

“She feels heavy,” I say.

“She feels
very
heavy,” Dad says, “but boy is she beautiful!”

I pass Bonnie to Brian, who passes her to Timmy, who says thank you, and Brian doesn't ask who said thank you, and Mom gets smelling salts from the first-aid kit and Olaf snaps awake and asks what happened to my noggin and Mom tells him that he banged it on the patio after tripping on his foot and Dad winks at her and that's when we know they'll patch it up.