The New Black (12 page)

When you speak into the receiver, your words are compressed into an electronic signal that bounces from phone to tower to satellite to phone, traveling thousands of miles, even if you're talking to your next-door neighbor, Joe. Which means there's plenty of room for a signal to ricochet or duplicate or get lost. Which means there are so many words—the ghosts of old conversations—floating all around us.

Consider this possibility. You pick up your phone and hear a voice—your voice—engaged in some ancient conversation, like that time in high school when you asked Natasha Flatt out for coffee and she made an excuse about her cat being sick. It's like a conversation shouted into a canyon, its words bouncing off walls to eventually come fluttering back to you, warped and soft and sounding like somebody else.

Sometimes this is what my memory feels like. An image or a conversation or a place will rise to the surface of my mind, and I'll recognize it vaguely, not knowing if I experienced it or saw it on television or invented it altogether.

Whenever I try to fix my attention on something, a red light goes on in my head, and I'm like a bird circling in confusion.

X

I find myself on the sidewalk of a new hillside development called Bear Brook. Here all the streets have names like Kodiak and Grizzly. All around me are two-story houses of a similar design, with freshly painted gray siding and river-rock entryways and cathedral windows rising above their front doors to reveal chandeliers in the foyer of each. Each home has a sizable lot that runs up against a pine forest. And each costs more than I would make in twenty years with West Teleservices.

A garbage truck rushes past me, raising tiny tornadoes of dust and trash, and I raise my hand to shield my face and notice a number written on the back of it, just below my knuckles—13743—and though I am sure it will occur to me later, for the moment I can't for the life of me remember what it means.

At that moment a bird swoops toward a nearby house. Mistaking the window for a piece of sky, it strikes the glass with a thud and falls into the rose garden beneath it, absently fluttering its wings; soon it goes still. I rush across the lawn and into the garden and bend over to get a better look at it. A bubble of blood grows from its beak and pops. I do not know why, but I reach through the thorns and pick up the bird and stroke its cool, reddish feathers. Its complete lack of weight and its stillness overwhelm me.

When the bird fell, something fell off a shelf inside me—a nice, gold-framed picture of my life, what I dreamed it would be, full of sunshine and ice cream and go-go dancers. It tumbled down and shattered, and my smiling face dissolved into the distressed expression reflected in the living room window before me.

I look alarmingly ugly. My eyes are black-bagged. My skin is yellow. My upper lip is raised to reveal long, thin teeth. Mine is the sort of face that belongs to someone who bites the heads off chickens in a carnival pit, not the sort that belongs to a man who cradles in his hands a tiny red-winged blackbird. The vision of me, coupled with the vision of what I once dreamed I would be—handsome, wealthy, feared by men and cherished by women—assaults me, the ridiculousness of it and also the terror, the realization that I have crept to the edge of a void and am on the verge of falling in, barely balanced.

And then my eyes refocus, concentrating on a farther distance, where through the window I see a man rising from a couch and approaching me. He is tall and square-shouldered. His hair is the color of dried blood on a bandage. He looks at me with derision, saying through the glass, “The hell do you think you're doing on my property?” without saying a word.

I drop the bird and raise my hand, not quite waving, the gesture more like holding up something dark to the light. He does not move except to narrow his eyes further. There's a stone pagoda at the edge of the garden, and when I take several steps back my heel catches against it. I stumble and then lose my balance entirely, falling hard, sprawling out on the lawn. The gray expanse of the sky fills my vision. Moisture from the grass seeps into my jeans and dampens my underwear. My testicles tighten like a fist.

In the window the man continues to watch me. He has a little red mustache, and he fingers it. Then he disappears from sight, moving away from the window and toward the front door.

Just before I stagger off the lawn and hurry along the sidewalk and retreat from this place, my eyes zero in on the porch, waiting for the man to appear there, and I catch sight of the address: 13743.

And then I am off and running. A siren announces itself nearby. The air seems to vibrate with its noise. It is a police cruiser, I'm certain, though how I can tell the difference between it and an ambulance, I don't know. Either way, someone is in trouble.

X

The body was blackened by its lengthy exposure to radio frequency fields. Cooked. Like a marshmallow left too long over flame. This is why the deputies shut off the transmitters, when they climbed the tower.

Z-21 interviewed Jack Millhouse, a professor of radiation biology at Oregon State. He had a beard, and he stroked it thoughtfully. He said that climbing the tower would expose a person to radio frequencies so powerful they would cook the skin. “I'd ask around at the ER,” he said. “See if somebody has come in with radiation burns.”

Then they interviewed a woman in a yellow, too-large T-shirt and purple stretch pants. She lived nearby and had seen the commotion from her living room window. She thought a man was preparing to jump, she said. So she came running in the hopes of praying him down. She had a blank, round face no one would ever call beautiful. “It's just awful,” she said, her lips disappearing as she tightened her mouth. “It's the most horrible thing in the world, and it's right here, and we don't know why.”

X

I know I am not the only one who has been cut off by a swerving car in traffic or yelled at by a teacher in a classroom or laughed at by a woman in a bar. I am not the only one who has wished someone dead and imagined how it might happen, pleasuring in the goriest details.

Here is how it might happen:

I am in a kitchen with duck-patterned wallpaper. I stand over a man with a Gerber hunting knife in my hand. There is blood dripping off the knife, and there is blood coming out of the man. Gouts of it. It matches the color of his hair. A forked vein rises on his forehead to reveal the panicked beating of his heart. A gray string of saliva webs the corner of his mouth. He holds his hands out, waving me away, and I cut my way through  them.

A dog barks from the hallway, and the man screams a repulsive scream, a girlish scream, and all this noise sounds to me far away, like a conversation overheard between pops of static.

I am aware of my muscles and their purpose as never before, using them to place the knife, putting it finally to the man's chest, where it will make the most difference.

At first the blade won't budge, caught on a rib, and then it slips past the bone and into the soft red interior, deeper and then deeper still, with the same feeling you get when you break through that final restraining grip and enter a woman fully. The response is just as cathartic: a shriek, a gasp, a stiffening of the limbs followed by a terrible shivering that eventually gives way to a great, calming release.

There is blood everywhere—on the knife, on the floor, gurgling from the newly rendered wound that looks so much like a mouth—and the man's eyes are open and empty, and his sharp pink tongue lolls out the side of his mouth. I am amazed at the thrill I feel.

When I surprised him, only a few minutes ago, he was on the phone. I spot it now, on the shale floor, with a halo of blood around it. I pick it up and bring it to my ear and hope for the familiar, calming murmur of the dial tone.

Instead I hear a voice. “Hello?” it says.

X

One day, I think, maybe I'll write a story about all of this. Something permanent. So that I can trace every sentence and find my way to the end and back to the beginning without worrying about losing my way.

The telling would be complicated.

To write a story like this you would have to talk about what it means to speak into a headset all day, reading from a script you don't believe in, conversing with bodiless voices that snarl with hatred, voices that want to claw out your eyes and scissor off your tongue. And you would have to show what that does to a person, experiencing such a routine day after day, with no relief except for the occasional coffee break where you talk about the television show you watched last night.

And you would have to explain how the man named Pete Johnston sort of leaned and sort of collapsed against the fridge, how a magnet fell to the linoleum with a clack after you flashed the knife in a silvery arc across his face and then his outstretched hand and then into that soft basin behind the collarbone. After that came blood. And screaming. Again you stabbed the body, in the thigh, the belly, your muscles pulsing with a red electricity. Something inside you, some internal switch, had been triggered, filling you with an unthinking adrenaline that made you feel capable of turning over Volkswagens, punching through concrete, tearing phone books in half.

And you would have to end this story by explaining what it felt like to pull the body from the trunk of your car and hoist it to your shoulder and begin to climb the tower—one rung, then another—going slowly. You breathed raggedly. The dampness of your sweat mingled with the dampness of blood. From here—thirty, then forty, then fifty feet off the ground—you could see the chains of light on Route 97 and Highway 100, each bright link belonging to a machine that carried inside it a man who could lose control in an instant, distracted by the radio or startled by a deer or overwhelmed by tiredness, careening off the asphalt and into the surrounding woods. It could happen to anyone.

Your thighs trembled. You were weary, dizzy. Your fillings tingled, and a funny baked taste filled your mouth. The edges of your eyes went white and then crazy with streaks of color. But you continued climbing, with the wind tugging at your body, with the blackness of the night and the black shapes of birds all around you, the birds swirling through the air like ashes thrown from a fire. And let's not forget the sound—the sound of the tower—how it sounded almost like words. The hissing of radio frequencies, the voices of so many others coming together into one voice that coursed through you in dark conversation.

How These Things Come To Pass

H
anna does her best thinking late at night when all the usurpers living in her house are asleep. If it isn't winter, which is not often, she climbs out onto her roof with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She smokes and stares up at the blue black night sky. She lives in the North Country where the stars make sense. Hanna shares her home with her unemployed husband, her twin sister, her sister's husband, their son, and her father. She is the only one who works—mornings, she waits tables the Koivu Café and nights, she tends bar at Karpela's Supper Club. She leaves most of her tips at her best friend Laura's house. Hanna is plotting her escape.

The most popular dish at the Koivu is the
pannukakku
, a Finnish pancake. If Old Larsen, is too hung over, Hanna will heat the iron skillet in the oven and mix the batter—first eggs, beating them lightly, slowly adding the honey, salt, and milk, finally sifting the flour in. She enjoys the ratchet sound as she pulls the sift trigger. She sways from side to side, and imagines she is a Flamenco dancer. She is in Spain where it is warm, where there is sun and beauty. Hanna likes making
pannukakku
with extra butter so the edges of the pancakes are golden and crisp. Sometimes, she'll carefully remove the edges from a pancake and eat them just like that. She's still in Spain, eating bread from a
panadería
, perhaps enjoying a little wine. Then she'll hear someone shout order up and she is no longer in Spain. She is in the middle of nowhere, standing over a hot, greasy stove.

Peter, Hanna's husband, comes in for breakfast every morning. Hanna saves him a spot at the counter and she takes his order. He stares down her uniform, ogling her cleavage and waggling his eyebrows. She feigns affection, smacks his head with her order pad, and hands his ticket to Old Larsen who growls, “We don't do any damn substitutions,” but then makes Peter three eggs over easy, hash browns with onions and cheese, four slices of bacon, white toast, and two
pannukakku
, slightly undercooked. When his food is ready, Hanna takes a break, sits next to Peter, watches him eat. His beard is growing long. A man without a job doesn't need a clean face, he tells her. She hates watching Peter eat. She hates that he follows her to work. She hates his face.

Her husband thinks they are trying to have a child. He wears boxers instead of briefs though he prefers the security of the latter. Peter once read in a magazine that wearing boxers increased sperm motility. He and Hanna only have sex when the home ovulation kit he bought at Walmart indicates she is fertile. Peter would prefer to have sex every day. Hanna would prefer to never have sex with Peter again, not because she's frigid but because she finds it difficult to become aroused by a perpetually unemployed man. Two years ago, Hanna said she was going on vacation with Laura downstate and instead drove to Marquette and had her tubes tied. She wasn't going to end up like her mother with too many children in a too small house with too little to eat. Despite her best efforts, however, she has found herself living in a too small house with too many people and too little to eat. It is a bitter pill to swallow.

When she gets off work at three in the afternoon, Hanna goes home, washes the grease and salt from her skin, and changes into something cute but a little slutty. She heads to the university the next town over. She's 27 but looks far younger, so she pretends she's a student. Sometimes, she attends a class in one of the big lecture halls. She takes notes and plays with her hair and thinks about all the things she could have done. Other days, she sits in the library and reads books and learns things so that when she finally escapes she can be more than a waitress with a great rack in a dead Upper Michigan town.

Hanna flirts with boys because at the Michigan Institute of Technology there are lots and lots of boys who want nothing more than to be noticed by a pretty girl. She never pretends she's anything but smart. She's too old for that. Sometimes, the boys take her to the dining hall or the Campus Café for a snack. She tells them she's in mechanical engineering because Laura is a secretary in that department. Sometimes, the boys invite her to their messy dorm rooms littered with dirty laundry and video game consoles and roommates or their squalid apartments off campus. She gives them blowjobs and lays with them on their narrow twin beds covered in thin sheets and tells them lies they like to hear. After the boys fall asleep, Hanna heads back across the bridge to Karpela's where she tends bar until two in the morning.

Peter visits Hanna at the supper club too, but he has to pay for his drinks so he doesn't visit often. Don Karpela, the owner, is always around, grabbing at things with his meaty fingers. He's a greedy man and a friend of her father. Even though he's nearing sixty, Don is always breathing down Hanna's neck, bumping up against her in the cramped space behind the bar, telling her he'd make her damn happy if she'd leave her old man. When he does that, Hanna closes her eyes and breathes easy because she needs her job. If Peter is around when Don is making his moves, he'll laugh and raise his glass. “You can have her,” he'll slur, as if he has a say in the matter.

After the bar closes Hanna wipes everything down and washes all the glasses and empties the ashtrays. She and Laura, who also works at the supper club, will sit on the hood of Hanna's car in the back alley and hold hands. Hanna will lean against Laura's shoulder and inhale deeply and marvel that her friend can still smell good after hours in that dark, smoky space where men don't hear the word
no
. If the night is empty enough, they will kiss for a very long time, until their cold lips become warm, until the world falls away, until their bodies feel like they will split at the heart. She and Laura never talk about these moments but when Hanna is plotting her escape, she is not going alone.

Hanna's twin sister Anna often waits up for Hanna. She worries. She always has. She's a nervous woman. As a child, she was a nervous girl. Their mother, before she left, liked to say that Hanna got all the
sisu
, the fierce strength that should have been shared by both girls. Hanna and Anna always knew their mother didn't know them at all. They were both strong and fierce. Anna's husband worked at the paper mill in Niagara until some foreign company bought it and closed it and then most everyone in town lost their homes because all the work that needed doing was already done. When Anna called, nervous as always, to ask if she and her family could stay with Hanna, she had not even posed the question before Hanna said, “Yes.”

Hanna and Anna are not openly demonstrative but they love each other wildly. In high school, Anna dated a boy who didn't treat her well. When Hanna found out, she put a good hurting on him. Hanna pretended to be her sister and she took the bad boy up to the trails behind the county fairgrounds. She got down on her knees and started to give him head and she told him
if he ever laid a hand on her sister again
and before she finished that sentence, she bit down on his cock and told herself she wouldn't stop biting down until her teeth met. She smiled when she tasted his blood. He screamed so softly it made the hairs on her arm stand on end. Hanna still sees that boy around town once in a while. He's not a boy anymore but he walks with a hitch and always crosses to the other side of the street when he sees her coming.

On the nights when Hanna and Laura sit on the hood of Laura's car and kiss until their cold lips warm, Anna stands outside on the front porch, shivering, waiting. Her cheeks flush. Her heart flutters around her chest awkwardly. Anna asks Hanna if she's seeing another man and Hanna tells her sister the truth. She says, “No,” and Anna frowns. She knows Hanna is telling the truth. She knows Hanna is lying. She cannot quite figure out how she's doing both at the same time. The sisters smoke a cigarette together, and before they go in, Anna will place a gently hand on Hanna's arm. She'll say, “Be careful.” Hanna will kiss her twin's forehead, and she'll think, “I will,” and Anna will hear her.

How Hanna Ikonen knows it is time to get the girl and get out of town

Hanna and Anna's father Red lives in the basement. He's not allowed on the second floor where everyone sleeps. When Peter asks why, Hanna just shakes her head and says, “It's personal.” She doesn't share personal things with her husband. Her father used to work in the mines. When the last copper mine closed he didn't bother trying to learn a new trade. He started holding his back when he walked around, said he was injured. He collected disability and when that ran out, he lived with a series of girlfriends who each kicked him out before long. Finally, when there was no woman in town who would give him the time of day, Red showed up on Hanna's doorstep, reeking of whiskey, his beard long and unkempt. He slurred an incoherent apology for being a lousy father. He begged his daughter to have mercy on an old man. Hanna wasn't moved by his plea but she knew he would be her problem one way or the other. She told him he could make himself comfortable in the basement, but if she ever saw him on the second floor, that would be that. It has been fifteen years since the mine closed but Red still calls himself a miner.

The whereabouts of Hanna and Anna's mother, Ilse, are unknown. She left when the girls were eleven. It was a Thursday morning. Ilse got the girls and their brothers ready for school, fed them breakfast—steel cut oats topped with sliced bananas. She kissed them atop their pale blonde heads and told them to be good. She was gone when they returned home from school. For a while, they heard a rumor that Ilse had taken up with a shoe salesman in Marquette. Later, there was news of her from Iron Mountain, a dentist's wife, with a new family. Then there was no news at all.

Hanna and Anna have five brothers scattered throughout the state. They are mostly bitter, lazy, indifferent and unwilling to have a hand in the care and feeding of their father. When Hanna organized a conference call with her siblings to discuss the disposition of their father, The Boys, as they are collectively known, said it was women's work and if The Twins didn't want to do that work, they could let the old man rot. One of the brothers, Venn, offered to send Hanna or Anna, whomever shouldered the burden of caring for Red, twenty dollars a month. Simultaneously, The Twins told him to stick it up his ass and then they told The Boys to go fuck themselves. After they hung up, Hanna called Anna and Anna offered to take care of Red until he drank himself to death but Hanna worried that death by drink would take too long. Anna had a child to raise, after all.

It is an ordinary Tuesday when Hanna decides to go home after working at the café instead of heading across the bridge to the Institute to play make believe with college boys. She can feel grease oozing out of her pores and what she wants, more than anything, is to soak in a clean bathtub, in an empty house. When she pulls into her driveway and sees Anna pacing back and forth in front of the garage, Hanna knows there will be no bath or empty house today. She parks the car, takes a deep breath and joins her sister who informs Hanna that their mother is sitting on the Salvation Army couch in the living room drinking a cup of tea. Hanna thinks, “Of course she is.”

How Hanna met and married Peter Lahti

Anna fell in love when she was seventeen. His name was Logan, and he lived on the reservation in Baraga. She loved his long black hair and his smooth brown skin and the softness of his voice. They met at a football game and the day after graduation, they married and moved. When Anna left, Hanna was happy for her sister, but she also hoped beyond all hopes that her sister and her new husband would take her with them. She could have said something. Years later Hanna realized she should have said something, but she became the one who stayed. She got an apartment of her own and started hanging out at the university sitting in on the classes she couldn't afford. Peter lived in the apartment next door and back then, he worked as a truck driver hauling lumber downstate so dating him was fine because he wasn't around much.

After a long trip where Peter was gone for three weeks, he showed up at Hanna's door, his hair slicked back, beard trimmed, wearing a button down shirt and freshly pressed jeans. In one hand, he held a cheap bouquet of carnations. He had forgotten that Hanna had told him, on their first date, that she hated carnations. He thrust the flowers into Hanna's hands, invited himself into her apartment and said, “I missed you so much. Let's get married.” Hanna, elbow deep into a bottle of wine at that point, shrugged. Peter, an optimist at heart, took the gesture as a response in the affirmative. They married not long after in a ceremony attended by Anna and her husband, Red, and three of The Boys. No one from Peter's family attended. His mother was scandalized her boy would marry any child of Red Ikonen.

How Red Ikonen got his reputation

Red Ikonen had mining in his blood. His daddy and his daddy's daddy had been miners up in Calumet when mining was something that mattered up there and the town was rich and every Sunday the churches were full of good folks grateful for the bounties of the hard earth. As a boy, Red loved his father's stories about the world beneath the world. By the time it was Red's turn to head underground, there wasn't much mining left to do and that was a hell of a cross to bear. He was as a soldier without a war. Red started drinking to numb his disappointment. He married a pretty girl, had five handsome boys and two lovely girls and continued drinking to celebrate his good fortune. The pretty girl left and he drank so he wouldn't feel so lonesome. Finally, drinking was the only thing he knew how to do so that's just what he did.

He was a tall man—6'7”, and he had a loud voice and no sense of how to act right. That sort of thing just wasn't in him. There wasn't a bar in town where Red hadn't started a fight or done something untoward with his woman or someone else's woman. Things had gotten so bad he needed to drive over to South Range or Chassell to drink with the old guys at the VFW who really were soldiers without a war because no one in town wanted to serve him a drink. When The Boys were still in town, bartenders would call and have one of them come get their father. By the time Red Ikonen was drinking so he wouldn't feel so lonesome he had become a mean drunk. He never had a kind word for his boys who drove miles into the middle of the night to bring their drunk daddy back home.