Marvel and a Wonder (39 page)

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In the emergency room, three hours later, the boy sat watching the nurse take his grandfather’s pulse behind the pale-blue curtain. She held his wrist like it was a child’s, then set it down and tucked it beneath the blue blanket. She wrote something on the chart, checked the IV, and wrote something else before exiting.

Then they were alone. The boy stood there still for some time before putting a hand on the old man’s blanketed foot. “I didn’t know who to call so I called Mr. Northfield. He said he’s gonna drive down tonight. He wanted to let you know he was gonna bill you for every mile.”

The grandfather blinked slowly.

“There’s a policeman and a state trooper out there. They said they want to talk to you. But the doctor said they have to wait. So all you got to do now is rest.”

The grandfather blinked again.

The boy coughed, then adjusted his glasses and peered down again. “You have to get better soon.” Then, lowering his head, speaking softer now, “You’re all I got left.”

The grandfather blinked once more. The boy lifted his hand from the old man’s foot and turned to face the curtain. He couldn’t decide if he should stay or go out in the waiting room.

“I better let you rest,” he finally said.

The grandfather squinted sharply.

The boy saw his pained expression and frowned. “Unless you’d like me to stay.”

The grandfather answered with his eyes and the boy sat down. The grandfather seemed to smile before slowly shutting his eyelids. Tomorrow, when he awoke, he would tell the boy what he thought, he would tell him everything. Tomorrow.

For A.L.

Thank you to Koren, Lucia, Nicolas. Thanks to Johnny Temple, Johanna Ingalls, Ibrahim Ahmad, Aaron Petrovich, and everyone at Akashic for their unending courage and unflagging support. Thank you to James Vickery for his insights as an early reader, Todd Baxter for his conversation and encouragement, Jon Resh for his enduring friendship and design acumen. Thanks to my family. Thanks to the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, its faculty, staff, and students. Thanks to Maria Massie, Sylvie Rabineau, Gil Netter, and Arthur Spector.

JOE MENO
is a fiction writer and playwright who lives in Chicago. He is the winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the editor of
Chicago Noir: The Classics
and the author of two short story collections and multiple novels including the best sellers
Hairstyles of the Damned
and
The Boy Detective Fails; Office Girl;
and his latest novel,
Marvel and a Wonder.
He is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

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Excerpt from
Office Girl

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The following is an excerpt
of the opening pages of
Office Girl

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ANYWAY IT’S SNOWING.

But then there is the absolute bullshit of it! The amazing gall of some people! Who does he even think he is?
Odile Neff, art-school dropout, age twenty-three, rides her green bicycle along the snowy streets of the city that evening at five p.m., arguing with herself. She is wearing one gray sock and one black sock and her faint-pink underwear, hidden beneath her long gray skirt, is dirty. It is January 1999, one year before the world as everyone knows it is about to end. Communism, like God, is already dead.

Having just finished an eight-hour shift conducting telephone surveys for an international research company—
How many members in your family? What sort of hair spray do you use? How often do you use your hair spray? Have you noticed any dermatological irritations, including but not limited to eczema, carbuncles, warts, or various skin cancers, in connection with the frequent use of your hair spray? Has your hair spray ever interfered with the quality of your life?—
she is now riding home and swearing to herself about something she is having a difficult time understanding, and about the person who has become the cause of all her grief. Her green hood is up, completely covering her small white ears, green scarf bound around her chin, the hem of her gray skirt blowing as she pedals along. It’s only the second week of January but the winter has already become a verifiable pain in the neck. She wears her pink mittens which have become unknotted, the pale pink penumbras of her fingernails peeking out. And with these mittens she holds the cold plastic of the bicycle’s handles, cursing to herself again and again.

“Asshole!” she shouts out loud. “Why won’t you talk to me? Why not just talk to me and be honest about everything?”

She never thought she would be so stupid, and yet, here she is. Her fancy pearlescent shoes, bought for twelve bucks at the thrift store, keep slipping off the pedals, making her even more frustrated. The gray sky, the waxy unending weather, the caliginous buildings rising up in humorless planes of speckled silver glass, all of it makes her feel so small, so tiny. The snow continues its liberated march in considerable flakes, falling all around in achromatic sheets of bleary chalk. Also, there is his gray sock, Paul’s gray sock, sitting in the left pocket of her parka, which she has been carrying around for the last few days.

Why am I so stupid?
she asks herself again
. Why do I keep wanting to be with him?

Her face is an abject expression of disgust, mouth twisted to the side in a frown, narrow eyebrows raised.

Is it just because I’m not supposed to? Is it just because he’s married? Is it just because I thought I had the world by the balls and I always end up making a mess of everything?

Her green bicycle, unable to answer, only vibrates with rage.

AT A STOPLIGHT.

Odile pauses a block later at a stoplight which has become obscured by ice. She looks over and sees a bus idling beside the curb. On the side of the bus is an advertisement for some men’s hair dye that promises to be
SO FEROCIOUS!
Odile grabs the silver paint marker from the pocket of her green coat and uncaps the pen and leans over and draws a pair of enormous silver breasts on the male model in the advertisement and then adds a pair of hairy, dangling, unkempt testicles between his legs. Beneath this pictogram she writes,
You are an idiot, Paul
. She then caps the pen, shoves it back into her pocket, and rides off through the uninterrupted snow.

A NOSE UNLIKE HER MOTHER’S.

Odile, pronounced
O-deel
, has dark hair, which runs just past her shoulders, a wide forehead, which is framed by uneven bangs she cut herself, and a pair of gray-blue eyes that are set several inches apart in a soft, heart-shaped face. The size of her eyes, larger than most girls’, lends a quality of constant amazement to all of her facial expressions. Her ears are attached to her head at a spot lower than average, and are also a little wider, suggesting an elfish affectation, though this is hardly noticeable, as it’s her large, gleaming eyes that draw you in. Her nose is neither long nor snub and is rounded in appearance, as it often is on the faces of girls of European descent. Her nose is unlike her mother’s, who at first glance may appear to be the greater beauty, as there is a small bump along the left side of the bridge of Odile’s nose, imperceptible to anyone who has not spent an afternoon lying in bed beside her, listening to the song she loves the most, “After Hours” by the Velvet Underground, or admiring her profile in the dark of a theater, ignoring the black-and-white film by John Cassavetes. This very small bump is the consequence of an ice-skating accident that occurred when Odile was six, and, on deeper inspection, only adds to her attractiveness. It allows the viewer to wonder what other worlds, what other small pleasures, there are to discover. Like the small beehive tattoo on her left wrist, which is so faint it’s almost invisible: What does it mean? How old was she when she got it? Will she tell about it you if you sleep together? You look at it and then up at her open mouth, at the sensitive lips, the lips rounder and somehow more adventurous than you noticed at first glance, the mouth already smiling, already laughing at something you said or did.

At the moment, atop her bicycle, her mouth is partially occluded by a green scarf, though it’s moving as she continues arguing with herself out loud. She curses at a cab driver and swerves past a woman with an incredibly wrinkly face, dressed in a gray fur coat. The woman’s arms are piled high with packages, each of them tied nicely with a white string bow.
Your face looks just like an elephant’s,
she wants to say but means it in the nicest possible way. And look out: there’s another drift.

BUT TEN YEARS BEFORE.

At the age of twelve, two weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Odile was molested by a group of boys who were several years older. It was after ice-skating practice one afternoon: Odile was waiting outside the rec center for her mother to come pick her up in the plain beige station wagon when five young men, boys from the nearby public school, found her sitting on the snowcovered merry-go-round and then began to taunt her. One of them had a ski mask on, another a red scarf around his face. She ignored them at first but when the boy with the mask leaned over and said something dirty, like, “Do you want to take a bite of my dick?” she stood, trying to run back inside the rec center. After a few steps through the snow they chased her over to the bottom of the cold metal slide, and then they took turns holding her down while each of them put their hands all over her, one of them, a boy with a dark peach-fuzz mustache, going so far as to get her black tights down to her knees. Another boy, who had a face like a mussel, all droopy and white and silvered-over with sweat, was the one peering over her when Odile realized it was she who was screaming. And then, somehow, she got her left hand free and grabbed ahold of his right ear and pulled as hard as she could. The boy shouted and rolled off and then one of the other boys hit Odile in the side of the head with a clod of snow and then she just laid there like she had died. The fact that she hadn’t died was, in fact, an awful kind of disappointment. She watched through a swollen eye as the boys all walked off. And then she got up a few minutes later and stumbled over to where her bag was lying, unfamiliar as an amputated limb, and then, holding her sore ear, her sore cheek, she limped to find her mother parked out in front, humming along to Sonny and Cher on the radio. Odile told no one about the incident and instead decided that if such a situation should happen ever again, she would force her attackers to kill her first. Having survived such a particularly violent and thoughtless assault, Odile found she was no longer afraid of anything.

AT THE CORNER OF DAMEN AND AUGUSTA.

On her bicycle, Odile stops at another red light and adds a pair of boobs to a poster advertising some moronic new hip-hop release. The rapper, DJ RAW, with his sunglasses and grill of gold teeth, now has a gratuitous pair of silver saddlebag tits hanging from his chest. And then she adds a diamond over his face. And then sketches a silver dunce cap on his head. This is all she’s been doing lately, drawing on street posters or other advertisements, because she hasn’t made anything good, anything really interesting of her own, in weeks. Lately all she’s been making are these weird, lewd doodles which she can’t even call art. She places the cap over the paint marker and then glances over at a blue newspaper dispenser which features a headline having to do with the president getting impeached. The idea of being impeached for getting a bj makes Odile crazy. Maybe in the next millennium people won’t be so worked up about screwing. Maybe after the comet that is coming to wipe out the world on New Year’s Eve has already annihilated everything, and people have become wax-faced mutants, maybe then everyone won’t be so uptight about sex. Maybe. And thinking of this, she adds a hairy vagina to the poster DJ’s lap. Yikes, it looks like a black insect. And she does all of this before the light turns green.

BUT THEN THERE IS HER YOUNGER BROTHER.

And she rides up to the shadow of her apartment building and locks her bicycle to the iron gate out front. She climbs the wet carpeted stairs and hopes her kid brother will be gone, but when she unlocks the door, she sees him still lying there on the couch, still wrapped up in his green sleeping bag, his dark brown bangs hanging in his too-skinny face. He doesn’t look right anymore. He looks a little disturbed, a little too serious for a boy who’s only seventeen.

“What are you still doing here, dipshit?” she asks. “You said you were leaving this morning.”

“I know, but then an episode of
CHiPs
came on, and I couldn’t make myself go.”

“You need to leave, Ike. You can’t stay here. Mom and Dad are already going absolutely nuts. They called last night. They’re really super-pissed. At both of us. But mostly me. You said you were going to the bus station this morning before I left.”