Men and Cartoons (5 page)

self-refilling cartridge
—” The man in the robe moved quickly, not lazy and sloppy at all now and kicked away his satchel with the tape inside and bent over him and reached behind his ear to tear the patch away, another momentary sting. He could only shout “Beer!” once more before the twilight world of the One-Way Permeable Barrier surrounded him, it was everywhere here, even Margaret was on the other side as long as she wore the patch, and he felt his voice sucked away to a scream audible inside the space of his own head but not elsewhere, he knew, not until he was back outside, on the street where he belonged and why couldn't he have stayed there? What was he thinking? Anyway it wouldn't be long now because through the gauze he saw the man in the robe who you'd have to call the man half out of his robe now open the door to let the robot in, then as the naked man grinned at him steel pinchers clamped onto his arm and he was dragged out of the room, screaming inaudibly, thrashing to no purpose, leaving Margaret behind. And his tape besides.

The Spray

T
HE APARTMENT WAS BURGLED AND THE
police came. Four of them and a dog. The three youngest were like boys. They wore buzzing squawking radios on their belts. The oldest was in charge and the young ones did what he told them. The dog sat. They asked what was taken and we said we weren't sure—the television and the fax machine, at least. One of them was writing, taking down what we said. He had a tic, an eye that kept blinking. “What else?” the oldest policeman said. We didn't know what else. That's when they brought it out, a small unmarked canister, and began spraying around the house. First they put a mask over the mouth and nose of the dog. None of them wore a mask. They didn't offer us any protection. Just the dog. “Stand back,” they said. They sprayed in a circle toward the edges of the room. We stood clustered with the policemen. “What's that?” we said. “Spray,” said the oldest policeman. “Makes lost things visible.”

The spray settled like a small rain through the house and afterward glowing in various spots were the things the burglar had taken. It was a salmon-colored glow. On the table was a salmon-colored image of a box, a jewelry box that Addie's mother had given us. There was a salmon-colored glowing television and fax machine in place of the missing ones. On the shelves the spray showed a Walkman and a camera and a pair of cuff links, salmon-colored and luminous. In the bedroom was Addie's vibrator, glowing like a fuel rod. We all walked around the apartment, looking for things. The eye-tic policeman wrote down the names of the items that appeared. Addie called the vibrator a massager. The dog in the mask, eyes watering. I couldn't smell the spray. “How long does it last?” we said.

“About a day,” said the policeman who'd done the spraying, not the oldest. “You know you c-can't use this stuff anymore, even though you c-can see it,” he said. “It's gone.”

“Try and touch it,” said the oldest policeman. He pointed at the glowing jewelry box.

We did and it wasn't there. Our hands passed through the visible missing objects.

They asked us about our neighbors. We told them we trusted everyone in the building. They looked at the fire escape. The dog sneezed. They took some pictures. The burglars had come through the window. Addie put a book on the bedside table on top of the glowing vibrator. It showed through, like it was projected onto the book. We asked if they wanted to dust for fingerprints. The older policeman shook his head. “They wore gloves,” he said. “How do you know?” we said. “Rubber gloves leave residue, powder,” he said. “That's what makes the dog sneeze.” “Oh.” They took more pictures. “Did you want something to drink?” The older one said no. One of the younger policemen said, “I'm allergic, just like the d-dog,” and the other policemen laughed. Addie had a drink, a martini. The policemen shook our hands and then they went away. We'd been given a case number. The box and the cuff links and the rest still glowed. Then Addie saw that the policemen had left the spray.

She took the canister and said, “There was something wrong with those policemen.”

“Do you mean how young they seemed?”

“No, I think they always look young. You just don't notice on the street. Outdoors you see the uniforms, but in the house you can see how they're just barely old enough to vote.”

“What are you going to do with that?” I said.

She handled it. “Nothing. Didn't you think there was something strange about those policemen, though?”

“Do you mean the one with the lisp?”

“He didn't have a lisp, he had a twitchy eye.”

“Well, there was one with an eye thing, but the one who stuttered—is that what you mean by strange?” Addie kept turning the canister over in her hands. “Why don't you let me take that,” I said.

“It's okay,” she said. “I guess I don't know what I mean. Just something about them. Maybe there were too many of them. Do you think they develop the pictures themselves, Aaron? Do they have a darkroom in the police station?”

I said, “Probably.” She said, “Do you think the missing things show up in the photographs—the things the spray reveals?”

“Probably.”

“Let's just keep it and see if they come back.”

“I wish you would put it on the table, then.”

“Let's find a place to hide it.”

“They're probably doing some kind of inventory right now, at the police station. They'll probably be back for it any minute.”

“So if we hide it—”

“If we hide it we look guiltier than if you just put it on the table.”

“We didn't steal anything. Our house was broken into. They left it here.”

“I wish you would put it on the table.”

“I wonder if the police do their inventory by spraying around the police station to see what's missing?”

“So if we have their spray—”

“They'll never know what happened!” She shrieked with laughter. I laughed too. I moved next to her on the couch and we rolled and laughed like monkeys in a zoo. Still laughing, I put my hand on the spray canister. “Gimme,” I said.

“Let go.” Her laughter faded as she pulled at the can. The ends of several hairs were stuck to her tongue. I pulled on the can. And she pulled. We both pulled harder.

“Gimme,” I said. I let go of the can and tickled her. “Gimme gimme gimme.”

She grimaced and twisted away from me. “Not funny,” she said.

“The police don't have their SPRAY!” I said, and kept tickling her.

“Not funny not funny.” Slapping my hands away, she stood up.

“Okay. You're right, it's not funny. Put it on the table.”

“Let's return it like you said.”

“I'm too tired. Let's just hide it. We can return it tomorrow.”

“Okay, I'll hide it. Cover your eyes.”

“Not hide-and-seek. We have to agree on a place. A locked place.”

“What's the big deal? Let's just leave it on the table.” She put it on the table, beside the salmon-colored glowing box. “Maybe somebody will break in and take it. Maybe the police will break in.”

“You're a little mixed up, I'd say.” I moved closer to the table.

“I'm just tired.” She pretended to yawn. “What a day.”

“I don't miss the stuff that was taken,” I said.

“You don't?”

“I hate television and faxes. I hate this little jewelry box.”

“See if you're still saying that tomorrow, when you can't see them anymore.”

“I only care about you, you, you.” I grabbed the canister of spray. She grabbed it too. “Let go,” she said.

“You're all I love, you're all that matters to me,” I said.

We wrestled for the can again. We fell onto the couch together.

“Let's just put it down on the table,” said Addie. “Okay.” “Let go.” “You first.” “No, at the same time.” We put it on the table.

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking,” she said.

“I don't know, probably.”

“What are you thinking?”

“What you're thinking.”

“I'm not thinking anything.”

“Then I'm not either.”

“Liar.”

“It probably doesn't work that way,” I said. “The police wouldn't have a thing like that. It isn't the same thing.”

“So why not try.”

“Don't.”

“You said it wouldn't work.”

“Just don't. It's toxic. You saw them cover the dog's mouth.”

“They didn't cover themselves. Anyway, I asked them about that when you were in the other room. They said it was so you wouldn't see the stuff the dog ate that fell out of its mouth. Because the dog is a very sloppy eater. So the spray would show what it had been eating recently, around the mouth. It's disgusting, they said.”

“Now you're the liar.”

“Let's just see.”

I jumped up. “If you spray me I'll spray you,” I shouted. The spray hit me as I moved across the room. The wet mist fell behind me, like a parachute collapsing in the spot where I'd been, but enough got on me. An image of Lucinda formed, glowing and salmon-colored.

Lucinda was naked. Her hair was short, like when we were together. Her head lay on my shoulder, her arms were around my neck, and her body was across my front. My shirt and jacket. Her breasts were mashed against me, but I couldn't feel them. Her knee was across my legs. I jumped backward but she came with me, radiant and insubstantial. I turned my head to see her face. Her expression was peaceful, but her little salmon-colored eyelids were half open.

“Ha!” said Addie. “I told you it would work.”

“GIVE ME THAT!” I lunged for the spray. Addie ducked. I grabbed her arm and pulled her with me onto the couch. Me and Addie and Lucinda were all there together, Lucinda placidly naked. As Addie and I wrestled for the spray we plunged through Lucinda's glowing body, her luminous arms and legs.

I got my hands on the spray canister. We both had our hands on it. Four hands covering the one can. Then it went off. One of us pressed the nozzle, I don't know who. It wasn't Lucinda, anyway.

As the spray settled over us Charles became visible, poised over Addie. He was naked, like Lucinda. His glowing shoulders and legs and ass were covered with glowing salmon hair, like the halo around a lightbulb. His mouth was open. His face was blurred, like he was a picture someone had taken while he was moving his face, saying something.

“There you go,” I said. “You got what you wanted.” “I didn't want anything,” said Addie.

We put the spray on the table.

“How long did the police say it would last?” I said. I tried not to look at Lucinda. She was right beside my head.

“About twenty-four hours. What time is it?”

“It's late. I'm tired. The police didn't say twenty-four hours. About a day, they said.”

“That's twenty-four hours.”

“Probably they meant it's gone the next day.”

“I don't think so.”

I looked at the television. I looked at the cuff links. I looked at Charles's ass. “Probably the sunlight makes it wear off,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Probably you can't see it in the dark, in complete darkness. Let's go to bed.”

We went into the bedroom. All four of us. I took off my shoes and socks. “Probably it's just attached to our clothes. If I take off my clothes and leave them in the other room—”

“Try it.”

I took off my pants and jacket. Lucinda was attached to me, not the clothes. Her bare salmon knee was across my bare legs. I started to take off my shirt. Addie looked at me. Lucinda's face was on my bare shoulder.

“Put your clothes back on,” said Addie.

I put them back on. Addie left her clothes on. We lay on top of the covers in our clothes. Lucinda and Charles were on top of us. I didn't know where to put my hands. I wondered how Addie felt about Charles's blurred face, his open mouth. I was glad Lucinda wasn't blurred. “Turn off the light,” I said. “We won't be able to see them in the dark.”

Addie turned off the light. The room was dark. Charles and Lucinda glowed salmon above us. Glowing in the blackness with the vibrator on the side table and the luminous dial of my watch.

“Just close your eyes,” I said to Addie.

“You close yours first,” she said.

Vivian Relf

P
APER LANTERNS WITH CANDLES INSIDE,
their flames capering in imperceptible breezes, marked the steps of the walkway. Shadow and laughter spilled from the house above, while music shorn of all but its pulse made its way like ground fog across the eucalyptus-strewn lawn. Doran and Top and Evie and Miranda drifted up the stairs, into throngs smoking and kissing cheeks and elbowing one another on the porch and around the open front door. Doran saw the familiar girl there, just inside.

He squinted and smiled, to offer evidence he wasn't gawking. To convey what he felt: he recognized her. She blinked at him, and parted her mouth slightly, then nipped her lower lip. Top and Evie and Miranda pushed inside the kitchen, fighting their way to the drinks surely waiting on a counter or in the refrigerator, but Doran hung back. He pointed a finger at the familiar girl, and moved nearer to her. She turned from her friends.

The foyer was lit with strings of red plastic chili peppers. They drooped in waves from the molding, their glow blushing cheeks, foreheads, ears, teeth.

“I know you from somewhere,” he said.

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

“You one of Jorn's friends?”

“Jorn who?”

“Never mind,” said Doran. “This is supposed to be Jorn's house, I thought. I don't know why I even mentioned it, since I don't know him. Or her.”

“My friends brought me,” said the girl. “I don't even know whose party this is. I don't know if
they
know.”

“My friends brought me too,” said Doran. “Wait, do you waitress at Elision, on Dunmarket?”

“I don't live here. I must know you from somewhere else.”

“Definitely, you look really familiar.”

They were yelling to be heard in the jostle of bodies inside the door. Doran gestured over their heads, outside. “Do you want to go where we can talk?”

They turned the corner, stopped in a glade just short of the deck, which was as full of revelers as the kitchen and foyer. They nestled in the darkness between pools of light and chatter. The girl had a drink, red wine in a plastic cup. Doran felt a little bare without anything.

“This'll drive me crazy until I figure it out,” he said. “Where'd you go to college?”

“Sundstrom,” she said.

“I went to Vagary.” Doran swallowed the syllables, knowing it was a confession:
I'm one of those Vagary types
. “But I used to know a guy who went to Sundstrom. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“I'm twenty-eight. You would have been there at the same time.” This was hardly a promising avenue. But he persisted. “Gilly Noman, that ring a bell?”

“Sounds like a girl's name.”

“I know, never mind. Where do you live?”

She mentioned a city, a place he'd never been.

“That's no help. How long have you lived there?”

“Since college. Five years, I guess.”

“Where'd you grow up?”

The city she mentioned was another cipher, a destination never remotely considered.

“Your whole life?” he asked. Doran racked his brain, but he didn't know anyone from the place.

“Yeah,” she said, a bit defensively. “What about you?”

“Right here, right around here. Wait, this is ridiculous. You look so familiar.”

“So do you.” She didn't sound too discouraged.

“Who are your friends here?”

“Ben and Malorie. You know them?”

“No, but do you maybe visit them often?”

“First time.”

“You didn't, uh, go to Camp Drewsmore, did you?” Doran watched how his feelings about the girl changed, like light through a turned prism, as he tried to fit his bodily certainty of her familiarity into each proposed context. Summer camp, for instance, forced him to consider whether she'd witnessed ball-field humiliations, or kissed one of the older boys who were his idol then, he, in his innocence, not having yet kissed anyone.

“No.”

“Drewsmore-in-the-Mist?”

“Didn't go to camp.”

“Okay, wait, forget camp, it must be something more recent. What do you do?”

“Until just now I worked on Congressman Goshen's campaign. We, uh, lost. So I'm sort of between things. What do you do?”

“Totally unrelated in every way. I'm an artist's assistant. Heard of London Jerkins?”

“No.”

“To describe it briefly there's this bright purple zigzag in all his paintings, kind of a signature shape. I paint it.” He mimed the movements, the flourish at the end. “By now I do it better than him. You travel a lot for the congressman thing?”

“Not ever. I basically designed his pamphlets and door hangers.”

“Ah, our jobs aren't so different after all.”

“But I don't have one now.” She aped his zigzag flourish, as punctuation.

“Hence you're crashing parties in distant cities which happen to be where I live.”

“Hey, you didn't even know if Jorn was a guy or a girl. I at least was introduced, though I didn't catch his name.”

He put up his hands: no slight intended. “But where do I know you from? I mean, no pressure, but this is mutual, right? You recognize me too.”

“I was sure when you walked in. Now I'm not so sure.”

“Yeah, maybe you look a little less familiar yourself.”

In the grade of woods over the girl's shoulder Doran sighted two pale copper orbs, flat as coins. Fox? Bunny? Raccoon? He motioned for the girl to turn and see, when at that moment Top approached them from around the corner of the house. Doran's hand fell, words died on his lips. Tiny hands or feet scrabbled urgently in the underbrush, as though they were repairing a watch. The noise vanished.

Top had his own cup of wine, half empty. Lipstick smudged his cheek. Doran moved to wipe it off, but Top bobbed, ducking Doran's reach. He glared. “Where'd you go?” he asked Doran, only nodding his chin at the familiar girl.

“We were trying to figure out where we knew each other from,” said Doran. “This is my friend Top. I'm sorry, what's your name?”

“Vivian.”

“Vivian, Top. And I'm Doran.”

“Hello, Vivian,” said Top, curtly, raising his cup. To Doran: “You coming inside?”

“Sure, in a minute.”

Top raised his eyebrows, said: “Sure. Anyway, we'll be there. Me and Evie and Miranda.” To Vivian: “Nice to meet you.” He slipped around the corner again.

“Friends waiting for you?” said Vivian.

“Sure, I guess. Yours?”

“It's not the same. They're a couple.”

“Letting you mingle, I guess that's what you mean.”

“Whereas yours are what—dates?”

“Good question. It's unclear, though. I'd have to admit they're maybe dates. But only maybe. Vivian what?”

“Relf.”

“Vivian Relf. Totally unfamiliar. I'm Doran Close. In case that triggers any recall.” Doran felt irritable, reluctant to let go of it, possibly humiliated, in need of a drink.

“It doesn't.”

“Have we pretty much eliminated everything?”

“I can't think of anything else.”

“We've never been in any of the same cities or schools or anything at the same time.” It gave him a queasy, earth-shifty sensation. As though he'd come through the door of the party wrong, on the wrong foot. Planted a foot or flag on the wrong planet: one small step from the foyer, one giant plunge into the abyss.

“Nope, I don't think so.”

“You're not on television?”

“Never.”

“So what's the basis of all this howling familiarity?”

“I don't know if there really is any basis, and anyway I'm not feeling such howling familiarity anymore.”

“Right, me neither.” This was now a matter of pure vertigo, cliff-side terror. He didn't hold it against Vivian Relf, though. She was his fellow sufferer. It was what they had in common, the sole thing.

“You want to go back to your friends?” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Don't feel bad.”

“I don't,” lied Doran.

“Maybe I'll see you around.”

“Very good then, Less-Than-Familiar-Girl. I'll look forward to that.” Doran offered his hand to shake, mock-pompously. He felt garbed in awkwardness.

Vivian Relf accepted his hand, and they shook. She'd grown a little sulky herself, at the last minute.

Doran found Top and Evie and Miranda beyond the kitchen, in a room darkened and lit only by a string of Christmas lights, and cleared of all but two enormous speakers, as though for dancing. No one danced, no one inhabited the room apart from the three of them. There was something petulant in choosing to shout over the music, as they were doing.

“Who's your new friend?” said Miranda.

“Nobody. I thought she was an old friend, actually.”

“Sure you weren't just attracted to her?”

“No, it was a shock of recognition, of seeing someone completely familiar. The weird thing is she had the same thing with me, I think.” The language available to Doran for describing his cataclysm was cloddish and dead, the words a sequence of corpses laid head to toe.

“Yeah, it's always mutual.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Look around this party,” said Doran. “How many people could you say you've never been in a room together with before? That they didn't actually attend a lower grade in your high school, that you couldn't trace a link to their lives? That's what she and I just did. We're perfect strangers.”

“Maybe you saw her on an airplane.”

Doran had no answer for this. He fell silent.

Later that night he saw her again, across two rooms, through a doorway. The party had grown. She was talking to someone new, a man, not her friends. He felt he still recognized her, but the sensation hung uselessly in a middle distance, suspended, as in amber, in doubt so thick it was a form of certainty. She irked him, that was all he knew.

I
T WAS
two years before he saw the familiar girl again, at another party, again in the hills. They recognized one another immediately.

“I know you,” she said, brightening.

“Yes, I know you too, but from where?” The moment he said it he recalled their conversation. “Of course, how could I forget? You're that girl
I don't know
.”

“Oh, yeah.” She seemed to grow immensely sad.

They stood together contemplating the privileges of their special relationship, its utter and proven vacancy.

“It's like when you start a book and then you realize you read it before,” he said. “You can't really remember anything ahead, only you know each line as it comes to you.”

“No surprises to be found, you mean?” She pointed at herself.

“Just a weird kind of pre—” He searched for the word he meant. Pre
formatting
? Pre
cognition
? Pre-
exhaustion
?

“More like a stopped car on the highway slowing down traffic,” she said, seemingly uninterested in his ending the unfinished word. “Not a gaudy crash or anything. Just a cop waving you along, saying
Nothing to see here
.”

“Doran,” he said.

“Vivian.”

“I remember. You visiting your friends again?”

“Yup. And before you ask I have no idea whose party this is or what I'm doing here.”

“Probably you were looking for me.”

“I've got a boyfriend,” she said. The line that was always awkward, in anyone's language. Then, before he could respond, she added: “I'm only joking.”

“Oh.”

“Just didn't want you thinking of me as Ben and Malorie's, oh, sort of
party accessory
. The extra girl, the floater.”

“No, never the extra girl. The girl I don't know from anywhere, that's you.”

“Funny to meet the girl you don't know, twice,” she said. “When there are probably literally thousands of people you do know or anyway could establish a connection with who you never even meet once.”

“I'm tempted to say small world.”

“Either that or we're very large people.”

“But maybe we're evidence of the opposite, I'm thinking now. Large
world
.”

“We're not evidence of anything,” said Vivian Relf. She shook his hand again. “Enjoy the party.”

T
HE NEXT
time
was
on an airplane, a coast-to-coast flight. Doran sat in first class. Vivian Relf trundled past him, headed deep into the tail, carry-on hugged to her chest. She didn't spot him.

He mused on sending back champagne with the stewardess, as in a cocktail lounge—
From the man in 3A
. There was probably a really solid reason they didn't allow that. A hundred solid reasons. He didn't dwell on Vivian Relf, watched a movie instead. Barbarian hordes were vanquished in waves of slaughter, twenty thousand feet above the plain.

They spoke at the baggage carousel. She didn't seem overly surprised to see him there.

“As unrelated baggage mysteriously commingles in the dark belly of an airplane only to be redistributed to its proper possessor in the glare of daylight on the whirring metal belt, so you repeatedly graze my awareness in shunting through the dimmed portals of my life,” he said. “Doran Close.”

“Vivian Relf,” she said, shaking his hand. “But I suspect you knew that.”

“Then you've gathered that I'm obsessed with you.”

“No, it's that nobody ever forgets my name. It's one of those that sticks in your head.”

“Ah.”

She stared at him oddly, waiting. He spotted, beneath her sleeve, the unmistakable laminated wristlet of a hospital stay, imprinted
RELF
,
VIVIAN
,
RM 315
.

“I'd propose we share a cab but friends are waiting to pick me up in the white zone.” He jerked his thumb at the curb.

“The odds are we're anyway pointed in incompatible directions.”

“Ah, if I've learned anything at all in this life it's not to monkey with the odds.”

There was a commotion. Some sort of clog at the mouth where baggage was disgorged. An impatient commuter clambered up to straddle the chugging belt. He rolled up suit sleeves and tugged the jammed suitcases out of the chute. The backlog tumbled loose, a miniature avalanche. Doran's suitcase was among those freed. Vivian Relf still waited, peering into the hole as though at a distant horizon. Doran, feeling giddy, left her there.