Want Not (36 page)

He saw Talmadge wince, as he replaced the meat into the backpack.

“Not even close, man.” Micah wagged her head. “You don’t get this at all.”

“So fucking
teach
me, okay?”

“Meat is the absence of a life.” She’d switched to that crisp lecture voice that’d lately been driving Matty insane; he sometimes felt the presence of a teleprompter behind his head. “So to consume it is to support that absence—to endorse it.”

“Yeah, but what I’m sayin is that the absence was already—absent. So the whole fucking deal gets turned. If this shit rots, then the absence is wasted. See?”

“I think what Matty’s saying,” Talmadge broke in, “is that once it’s been dumped, there’s, like, no ethical downside to—”

Micah cut him off. “I know what he’s saying.”

“All I’m saying,” said Matty, “is that I’ve been hearing you guys talking this shit for weeks, and, okay, you don’t eat meat, fine, whatever, but now you’re telling me to take however many pounds of this and dump it back into the trash, and, I dunno, it seems like someone’s principles might be seriously outta whack . . .”

“I’m sorry, you wanna talk principles?” She was riled now, her accent gone ornery:
you wan talk prince-pulls.

“I got mashed in a fucking compactor, okay? And not for
my
fucking principles!”

“Then
eat
it, man!” Micah was up on her feet now, taut as a slingshot. “It don’t have to be a party, okay? You wanna eat it, eat it.
Jesus.
”

“Fuck it,” Matty said, “I will,” as he gathered five packages into his arms and went stomping to the kitchen where he slapped them onto the counter and with a purposeful clamor shoved aside a stack of plates crusted with the remnants of Tal and Micah’s fruit-mush breakfast and bean-mush lunch. He tore the plastic off a package of two strip steaks, sniffed them, shrugged, and then tried to figure out, vainly, how the hell to light those stupid goddamn Boy Scout stoves. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, fiddling with the cap on the methanol can while entertaining baleful mental images of his beard ablaze in the aftermath of an explosion. As frightening as the potential pain was the potential irony:
SQUATTER DIES IN COOKING EXPLOSION HOURS AFTER SURVIVING COMPACTOR CRUSHING
. “Tal!” he shouted.

Talmadge came slinking into the doorway sideways.

“Light these fuckers for me.”

“Don’t be pissed, dude.”

“Light both of ’em. I want ’em hot.”

“I got it, got it. Here. Just be cool, okay?”

Talmadge retreated back to the doorway, as though he needed to remain within Micah’s view range, and there he lingered, half in and half out, while Matty banged two sauté pans onto the burners and unwrapped another package of meat—the veal chops. He plopped the strip steaks onto one of the pans, which wasn’t yet hot enough to produce a sizzle. The steaks just lay there, looking very very dead. Matty poked one, arousing a feeble curl of steam.

“Might want some oil,” Talmadge offered.

“I can handle this,” Matty replied, dropping the veal chops into the other pan with an equal lack of sizzle. For several minutes he stood there, monitoring the meat with unblinking concentration, and thereby ignoring Talmadge, until, as commonly happened when he stood still for too long, he was jogged by the desire for a joint—he had one or two pre-rolled packed with his cigarettes, and he knew the drifting odor would curl Micah’s lip that much further. Extending his arm, he gestured for Tal’s lighter by flicking his thumb against his fist; but Talmadge had vanished, which was probably for the best but made something sink inside him anyhow. Lipping the joint, Matty lowered his face to the burner and, with one hand shielding his beard, lit it with the hissy blue flame. Then, glancing around the corner to be extra sure of Tal’s absence, he grabbed the bottle of olive oil and doused both pans. The oil, however, pooled uselessly to the imbalanced sides. He poked the still dead-looking steaks again, inadvertently peppering one with fallen ash. “Shit,” he whispered, brushing it into the meat. Then he heard Micah’s banjo kicking back up. “Shit,” he whispered again. From a pocket he dug his cellphone and a set of earbuds and with a few finger flicks drowned out the
ding a dang
s with ASG’s “Yes We Are Aware”: a fast filthy avalanche of guitar crunch and cymbal assault, the sonic antidote to that folk-fuck banjo noise and Micah’s voice atop it, all that cooing about rivers and wildflowers and sweet Jesus and fair-n-tender ladies and better times a-comin. He tried flipping the steaks, but they were cemented to the pan; some violent scraping was required. Hankering for something even harder, he cut short ASG and switched to a song by the Scrambled Defuncts, a Moscow atmo-black metal band that Gleb had turned him onto. Yeah, this was better—like a jackhammer in each ear, engaged in a deathmatch race to crack his skull.

When he figured the meat was done or maybe-done, Matty stacked it all—two steaks, three chops—onto one overloaded plate and hauled it to the table. The room was dark, cave-dark, but Matty didn’t care. He also didn’t care that the meat was overcooked to the point of petrification; whatever else the compactor had done, it’d squeezed the hunger right out of him. When sawing the meat proved impossible, he just ate it with his hands. Only once did he glance toward the living room, where Micah was deep into singing—her mouth open and head uptilted, looking like one of those caroling kids from the Charlie Brown Christmas special—and where Talmadge was staring at him with the saddest punished-puppy expression he could ever remember seeing on Tal’s face, maybe even worse than when Tal’s dad had called him to say he was ditching his mom and afterwards Tal had sat there stunned with a cold bong on his lap for like two hours. For a fleeting moment, barely the duration of a single manic guitar riff, their eyes locked—until, pricked by guilt, Matty dropped his gaze to his plate. The shame was narrow and precise: He felt guilty for how disgusted he was with Tal. He knew Tal was prone to being pussywhipped—he’d gone to a friggin
John Mayer
concert once, with what’s-her-name, that Memphis chick, who was hot but not
that
hot—but this, man, this was outer-limits whipped, this was like hibernating your nuts in a vat of liquid nitrogen, Matty just didn’t
get
this. He didn’t know what’d happened to his friend but he didn’t like it. When he’d chewed the steaks down, he went at the veal chops though he could feel his gut resisting—maybe because it was full, maybe because the spongy gray meat tasted vaguely acidic and had probably been dumped for good cause, despite what Micah said about the sham of “sell by” dates and all that shit. Still, he had a point to make. Not a point he could’ve put into words, but a point just the same. He chewed, he chewed, while the Russian jackhammers blasted out his inner ear, until all that remained on the plate were T-shaped veal bones and blubbery strips of gristle and one of Micah’s handmade napkins sopping up the scant juice. He glanced toward the living room, to be sure his victory had been witnessed and his whatever-it-was point had been made, but was disappointed to find it abandoned. He shut off the music, lit a cigarette, and decided he’d had enough.

Before eight the next morning he was already up and gone, and by nine he was inside the dumpster of that Henry Street nursing home, where Talmadge had fished out the sack of rice. But Matty wasn’t looking for food. “Paper,” he remembered saying. “All I see is fucking paper.” For an hour he combed the dumpster, tearing open giant clear bags that were filled with smaller clear bags and sifting through the paper he found, ripping open envelopes, scanning page after page, all the while stuffing his backpack. He would’ve stayed longer had not a huge black orderly come upon him saying
The hell you doin,
forcing him out of the dumpster and saying
Gwine outta here
in response to Matty’s ardent-sounding condemnation of “food waste.”

Out on the street he dialed the number he had for Gleb’s girlfriend in Seattle, which Gleb had told him was the best way to contact him. He didn’t know the girlfriend’s name—if Gleb had ever spoken it, he’d forgotten—but he did know, courtesy of photographs that Gleb kept under his mattress and didn’t mind sharing, that one of her asscheeks was adorned with a snake tattoo and she smoked cigarettes while giving head. She was so warm and chipper on the phone that Matty almost felt guilty for knowing this. She told him Gleb had scored an iPhone in prison, sounding inordinately proud, like a wife noting her husband’s promotion down at the plant. (He’d bought it from a guard, she said, which made Matty smile, knowing precisely which guard.) Matty texted Gleb:
cellie, wats ^? yr k9 nEdz hlp. bac east, got idea. cll l8r?
Half an hour later, Matty’s phone rang. After explaining his idea, he listened for a long and serious while, nodding, frowning, saying
rad, okay, thanks,
and scrawling several numbers on his dirty palm with a perfectly good ballpoint pen someone had abandoned in the trash.

T
HE FIRST ITEM ALEXIS
thought to add to her red plastic basket was shampoo, because everyone’s hair gets dirty, meaning everyone needs shampoo, and therefore no one could draw any conclusions or for that matter think anything at all about a bottle of shampoo. Not her regular brand, however (she was fond of Tea Tree Special from Paul Mitchell, it had this weird-cool Altoid-y tingle to it and it wasn’t tested on animals). She needed some other brand, one that couldn’t be tied to her, didn’t represent her. As she stood midway in the aisle at the CVS, adhered to the carpet by indecision, her ears picked up two competing frequencies: a piped-in Taylor Swift song, which sounded to her the way Bubble Yum tastes after it’s been chewed for half an hour, and the magnetic buzz of the fluorescent lights above her, which was more than merely sonic. She could
feel
the buzz as well, as if she was caught in some force field or X-ray machine; she felt radioactive, and possibly a little nauseated, as she stood scanning the six stories of shelves for a brand of shampoo that meant nothing, said nothing, that was alien to her but unremarkable to anyone else. The shampoo, like the rest of the drugstore miscellany she was here to gather, was not the primary object of her shopping, but rather a buffer: a means of obscuring or at least diluting the truth of her mission.

She reached out a hand, then retracted it. Not Herbal Essences, no—that’s the one Leighton Meester from
Gossip Girl
was modeling for, and Alexis
hated
that show, it was totally stupid. And not Kiss My Face shampoo, because she didn’t want anyone to
look
at her face much less consider kissing it, and not Suave because that was sort of Walmart-ish, and definitely
definitely
not Pantene Pro-V because that’s what her mom used. After a while her eyes came to rest upon a lonesome-looking bottle of Pert on the second shelf from the bottom, and her gaze lingered there, inscrutably, until with a prick of memory she made the connection: That’d been her dad’s brand. She remembered that stout green bottle from her early childhood, perched high up in the shower caddy where her dad’s razors and shaving gel used to live before he’d died and Aunt Liz had come in and scrubbed the house clean of his memory, just Lysol’d away every trace of him. Wanting to prolong and intensify the sentimental association she was feeling, she picked the bottle off the shelf and held it in one hand, lightly rubbing the label with her thumb. Her dad had always smelled so good, half-waking her up to plant a goodbye kiss on her cheek before heading off to catch the train to the city in the early early morning, the sudden blast of his cologne like a warm and welcome ray of sunlight alighting upon her face, his freshly-shaven-yet-still-scratchy cheek nuzzling hers, and God that’d always felt so . . . so
good,
him whispering
Bye bye sweetness
and her smiling drowsily without opening her eyes, savoring the kiss and her awareness that she had another hour and a half to burrow beneath her Powerpuff Girls comforter until her mom would come in barking, “Schooltime, Alexis, up and at ’em . . .” or some other dumb wake-up shit.

She startled. From around the corner a blue-shirted stockboy had emerged, pushing a flat cart loaded with cardboard boxes. He had bumpy pink skin and a high bony forehead but was mildly cute anyway, in an indie Brooklyn kind of way. He glanced at her, then immediately dropped his eyes as he rolled the cart toward her—forcing her, by not merely his presence but also his age and gender and semi-cuteness, to make her shampoo choice. The Pert, fine, whatever: She dropped the bottle into her basket with an affected nonchalance, even drawing a finger to her lips to suggest a half-remembered mental shopping list, then evacuated the aisle before the stockboy could put two and two together to figure out the monumentally fucked-up reason she was loading up a basket at a CVS store to which she’d driven 12.9 miles and 24 minutes, passing three other drugstores on the way. Rounding the corner, toward—where? the moisturizer aisle, okay—she felt certain that his eyes were trained on her back, that she’d roused suspicion, and her nausea doubled.

A bottle of Neutrogena. That’d do. She roamed the store, drawn to unpeopled aisles. In the makeup aisle she added Great Lash mascara (Blackest Black, straight-brush) even though she’d switched to Voluminous a year ago because Great Lash smeared. Then cottonballs. Sea Breeze astringent. Maybe a magazine? No, the checkout people sometimes paused with those, or made some comment about the celeb on the cover:
Is Kate still dating A-Rod? I don’t know why people say Jessica Simpson’s so fat. I saw that new Twilight movie, did you, ohmygod it sucked.
Stiffening herself, she drifted toward the healthcare aisles on the other side of the store, furtively noting the circular green signs (Wound Care, Warts & Lice) while making sure her eyes didn’t catch those of the Indian-lady pharmacist surveying the store from a counter in the rear. Pain & Sleep, Eye Care. Allergy & Asthma. Laxatives, across from—there it was, oh God, Family Planning.

But she couldn’t go there yet. Jesus. She added a jar of Tylenol to her basket, thinking she might actually
need
that. She felt the fluorescent buzz heightening, as if the light-tubes were straining under some gaseous pressure and would soon explode, one after the other, showering hot yellow sparks onto the floor and maybe easing this whole situation by killing her. Just . . . killing her. So that her mom could erase
her
memory, too, and so everyone could go on with their lives without stupid fucking
stupid
Alexis dragging them down. She heard a telephone ring, watched the pharmacist lady take the call then disappear behind some shelves stocked with fat white pill bottles. With a deep and resolute inhalation, Alexis made her move.