The Unfinished World (7 page)

Clarence arrived two weeks early, a birthday surprise for their mother, and there wasn't time to get to the hospital. Doctor Lloyd
came to the house and delivered Clarence in their parents' bedroom, while Louise and her father watched terrified from the doorway. It took six hours for her brother to be born.

Louise's father and mother held hands after and smiled, exhausted, but happy because they were still in love. They were so absorbed in each other that Louise was first to hold the screaming Clarence. She stroked his strange, wrinkled skin, covered in dark golden down, and he quieted, raptly absorbing her blurred face.

Looks like he loves his big sister already, said Doctor Lloyd, and Louise looked solemnly up at him.

Of course he does, she said. The doctor felt a strange sadness at that, as if he could read a prophecy, as if he could hear the warning bells, buried in the baby's soft whimpers and in the sister's solemn phrases.

Louise is shaping a black bear's ears when the doorbell rings. She flicks on the security camera monitor, sees a blond young woman, very pretty in a loud, artificial way. She's wearing a tracksuit scattered with sequins and a good bit of hair that isn't her own. Louise considers briefly as she's mixing Bondo and fiberglass resin, but decides not to answer the door. She's never interfered in Clarence's amours before, and she doesn't see now as the time to start. The young woman is crying, thick dark mascara tracking new shadows into the terrain of her lovely young face. Louise reaches up and shuts the monitor off. She picks up her knife, makes a small opening between the skin and the cartilage of the bear's right ear.

The doorbell rings again. And again. And then again. Louise sighs, puts down the knife. She takes the stairs two at a time and
throws open the door. He's not here, she explains to the tracksuit. It's pink, she sees, pastel pink as a cartoon stomach.

I know, she says. Louise folds her arms. She stares, and Pink Tracksuit crumples further, sitting on the step and gasping. She is clearly in the throes of some kind of hysteria.

Would you like to come in, says Louise, and it is not a question. She tries to pry the girl up by the armpits but Pink Tracksuit is not having any of it. Her mouth keeps working, glossy lips twisting around sobs and half-syllables that seem to keep getting caught before they can emerge. Look, says Louise, not unkindly, I really don't know where Clarence is. He hasn't been around for days.

They shoot him! The words fly from Pink Tracksuit's face like a strong headwind; the spell is broken. Now the language floods the dam, in Russian, in English, in something halfway both, but in between the sobs and the foreign words a phrase, repeated over and over again until Louise is certain it must be true, and is frozen to the step with the horror of it. They shoot him, she says. They shoot him and he is dead.

Clarence and Louise outside in the dark. They are teenagers here, brains and bodies growing faster than they can understand. Their parents are mostly gone, but not yet dead.

Look at that moon, says Louise to Clarence. It's surprised at the world tonight. See how its mouth is hanging open?

The Man in the Moon, Clarence tells her, is made up of terrible catastrophes. Firestorms on the terrain.

Louise and Clarence, doing what they've done since they were small: their backs on the front lawn and eyes stretched toward the stars. It really has got a face, though, Louise says. It's not
entirely metaphorical. She sketches on the sky with her finger: mouth, nose, eyes.

But that's my point, says Clarence. The things that caused all that damage, those mouth craters and so on, mostly took place forever ago. Before we were even here.

You're saying, says Louise, that it's so typical of our species to give human features to the sad things in space?

I'm saying the world doesn't need our stories. The world is doing just fine without a plot.

Then why bother making all these stories? Louise asks. Why make art at all?

Clarence shrugs, scratches at a mosquito bite on his shoulder. Because what else are we going to do?

Louise is an arrow. She is a blade. She is a flight through the air and a touchdown in skin. She is a bloody hole and she is endlessly spinning down the black, falling through the void, sounds filtering through a second too late, like a badly dubbed film. Filtering screams and footsteps, scuffling in the drive. A thick and heavy, world-ending thud. She watches the road ringed in black, her brother's shadow flying over. Her eyes are red and dry as desert clay.

A car screeching away down the dusty drive.

Louise standing over the long blond body.

Clarence's eyes, open, clouded as the past. She is already forgetting what they looked like clear.

Why do we have no memories for the things we love? she wonders. But Tony.

Tony the Tiger.

Tony the trophy.

Tony, who has dropped her dead brother in this dirt road with less reverence than one of the Big Man's dogs. Tony, who has proved a thug, a villain, a gangster with her heart flattening in his fist.

Tony the dead body, slumped over the backseat.

Tony's life pooling onto the leather seats. A skinning knife in Tony's heart.

The Big Man will consider it fair, in the end; above all else he understands vengeance. He understands what love burns away, and what it leaves behind.

The Logic of the Loaded Heart

I
f John is three, and John's mother is six times his age, how old was John's mother when John was conceived in the back of Al Neill's pickup truck after a Styx concert in Milwaukee? If John's parents spend 100 times zero days being actual parents to John, how many days' total is that? Does your answer change if John's mother sometimes bought him Mr Pibb and lottery tickets when she stopped at the gas station on her way home from work?

Extra credit:
Please calculate the probability that at his mother's current age, John will drop out of school and work in a burger joint while playing lead guitar in a heavy metal band called The Slaughterhouse Four.

When John is six, his father goes to prison for attempted robbery of the Rocky Rococo Pizza in Delavan, Wisconsin. Please calculate the probability that The Slaughterhouse Four will open for Def Leppard at the Minnesota State Fair in what will be the brightest shining moment and impossible dream of John's life.

At thirty-six, John has three ex-wives, one current wife, and nine children. (Holy shit, John.) If John still works in fast food, and his youthful good looks have sunken like a shipwreck with the passage of time, how many women in this bar will go home with him tonight?

How many women will go home with John tonight if John's band, now called Shards of Death, is playing tonight at this bar? Does that number increase or decrease if John is wearing a T-shirt that says “Swallow or It's Going in Your Eye”?

Amy has had five Amstel Lights, and her blood alcohol level is .08. If John is fifteen years older than Amy, how many hours will it be until she wakes up in his apartment, hungover and horrified by her poor decision-making?

If John's wife comes home from her night shift at Perkins at that precise moment, and her anger level is rising at a rate of 3 millimeters per second, what is the volume of John's wife's anger after the approximately fifteen seconds it takes John to put on his pants?

Extra credit:
How many minutes until John's wife threatens to take the kids and the money and leave? How many days until John's wife sneaks into the basement at three in the morning and puts holes through his favorite electric guitar with a long series drill bit?

John hires a man to kill his wife, and agrees to pay him 30 percent up front, and the rest when the job is completed. If the total amount is $100,000, how much will the hired man get up front? And how many years will the judge subtract from or add to John's sentence if he was high on crack cocaine when he ordered the killing?
Bonus question: If John is $11K in debt and agrees to pay a contract killer $100K, how long does John have to live?

John's band has had four names—but not at the same time. The first year, John changes his band's name and then he changes it again at evenly spaced intervals over the course of twelve years. How many years separate each name change, and how many years will the names “Viking Fists” and “Ogres' Blood” cause the judge to add to John's attempted murder sentence? Does it even matter? Will John have a new life in prison? Will it be better, or maybe at least cleaner, tidier, than the one outside?

Bonus extra credit:
If John's mother at fifteen and his father at twenty were given extraordinary foresight, would they have fallen in love? Would they have stood in line, in the raw cold and rain, for those Styx tickets? Would they have listened to the nostalgic-yet-aspirational lyrics of “Come Sail Away” and thought, We
could
set an open course for the virgin sea? Would they have climbed into the back of that pickup truck in the afterglow, nails and bolts under bare skin and school and plant shift not withstanding? Would they have purchased extra condoms at the five-and-dime? Would they have wanted to preserve all they had—or would they have taken a chance, anyway, because when love sings down the microphone and strikes you, who can say what would happen if you failed to swoon and fall at its feet? Who can say whether A leads to B leads to C or how many apples John ended up with in the end? Who can say why the loaded heart defies all logic, like an unfinished word problem, like a riddle written in the human dust of a crowded barroom?

Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting

O
ne:
The time traveler leaves her craft in a copse of trees near the center of the park. She walks quickly—as quickly as she can these days, with her aging knees and hips. She buys a flimsy little card and takes the subway downtown till she reaches the poorest part of the city. She finds the artist at home amidst the squalor, paints scattered, no hot water, barely room for a dirty mattress. Downstairs a baby cries. He is so young, the artist, a white smooth face in the dark of his walk-up. She supposes this will be easy—from the empty, hungry tilt of his face, to the stooped posture from painting under this sloped attic roof. She tells him her name, the name of a very famous sculptor: a lie. She tells him she has heard rumors, but finds he has no talent, that his paintings are no good: a lie, also. She tells him he should move back home to Modesto, become a dentist. There is money and there is security in dentistry. There is emotional stability and happiness.