Want Not (50 page)

Several hours later, as dawn was creeping through the streets outside, Micah sat propped against her pillow in their bed, a towel wedged damply between her legs, and stroked Talmadge’s long beautiful hair as he slept. He twitched, but lightly, like a porch-dog dreaming. He’d secretly hoped for this, she knew. Had maybe even willed it, if you believed such things possible. Into her mind drifted a memory of that day she’d found him swimming in the white gypsum dust of the Playa, and how Lola had instructed her, as they’d loaded his elasticized body into the van, to give him “the security of a womb.” That a womb could be insecure, hers especially, had never occurred to her. Outside, the hydraulic brakes of a sanitation truck hissed the prelude to the glassy music of empty gin bottles being collected from the cocktailery down the block. A narrow sliver of sunlight broke through the edge of the plywood covering the window, and Micah tracked its path across the room to where the far wall had captured it, to where a sword of silver-white light lay embedded in the graffitied plaster. Adjusting the pillow behind her, she felt her breasts slosh against her t-shirt, their gorged and futile soreness drawing fresh tears from her eyes. She continued to stroke Talmadge’s hair as the tears dribbled down onto her lips. All wasn’t lost, she tried telling herself, even as the noise of Matty rising from the living room floor mangled the quiet. She listened to him rummaging through the kitchen, heard the crinkly tearing of a Ho Ho wrapper, noted the difference in the clomps of his footsteps once his shoes were on, and savored a rinse of relief when she heard the door close behind him and his footsteps descend the stairs. Her Eden restored, or at least what was left of it.

It was unusual for Matty to wake first. The typical morning scene, which Micah had come to detest, involved her and Talmadge navigating their way around Matty’s sprawled snoresome body on the floor. Half a day might pass that way. Micah had found her banjo to be an effective alarm, prodding Matty to lift himself onto his elbows and with a groggy scowl mutter, “Fuck,” or, “Jesus fucking Christmas,” or some variation thereof. She’d begged Talmadge to evict him, over and over again she’d pleaded, nagged, threatened—but he was so timid with Matty, as though fearing him (though she couldn’t see why) or bound to him by some confidential and unpayable debt. Talmadge acted different around Matty, too: harder, caustic, with a shriveled sense of purpose or self. On prickly occasions she was reminded of the Lusk boys, flopped on the couch in their trailer, stretching out a single dirty joke for hours, pulling it like taffy, while empty beer cans gathered at their feet and cigarette smoke left a yellow film on their faces. As recently as Monday Talmadge had been promising Matty would be gone by week’s end. They’d been talking about it, he’d said, and while Matty didn’t know the reason for it, the urgency was clear. But here it was Saturday, with no signs of packing or of the celebratory send-off she knew Talmadge would arrange. She didn’t think she could face Matty today, imagining her grief smashing onto the rocks of his glib cluelessness, the violence of an overdue reckoning.

But that reckoning would never come. Only from the police, a day and a half later, would she learn the skeletal facts about why Matty had risen so early that morning, and where he’d gone.

His first stop had been a Starbucks down on Broadway, just across Bleecker Street from his ultimate destination: the Best Buy store down the block. Matty wanted to be there when it opened; he’d concocted a muddled rationale for this, thinking the store managers would be preoccupied with opening checklists and the cashiers still too foggyheaded and undercaffeinated to pay much attention to IDs and such, but his truer motivation was simpleminded excitement. Matty was going shopping, and he couldn’t wait. For more than an hour he charged his cellphone while disagreeably nursing the double espresso he’d bought to earn him access to the electrical outlet and, more important, to the bathroom. He despised the bathroom in the squat, with its Superfund-level cockroach colony stationed beneath the iron tub, and couldn’t bear to take a shit in there except on those regular occasions when Micah’s dumpster cuisine sparked medical emergencies in his combustible bowels. Of course, he also hated the espresso at Starbucks, having been schooled and spoiled by the coffeeshops of Portland, but in exchange for a roach-free potty he would’ve suckled a gasoline pump. At 10
A.M.
, when the Best Buy opened, Matty was already positioned outside the store, on the sidewalk beneath the six-story cast-iron-fronted building that housed it, smoking a cigarette while watching a street vendor array kebabs atop a dirty-looking brazier. Then he went in.

He got sidetracked almost immediately. On his shopping list was a single item: a laptop computer, which he’d been wanting for months. With a laptop, he thought, life would be different. He could watch movies instead of captively listening to Micah wank that goddamn banjo or, worse, in the evenings, listening to her and Tal read aloud from a trove of ancient letters they’d scrounged from that nursing-home dumpster. His insides would go flopping when he’d see one of them tweezing a letter from that foot-long wooden box on the sidetable. Half of them were written on gray Red Cross stationery that was so thin you could almost see through it. Tal liked to stress that they were from World War II—“combat letters,” he’d say—as if the minor balls of that fact outweighed the extraordinary pussy-ness of the letters’ content. To Matty it was awful beyond compare: “‘Does she comprehend the mad depth of my devotion?’” Talmadge would read, in character, as the Leo to Micah’s Doris. “‘Does she think of me as I think of my Doris, restlessly, hungrily, so constantly that even sleep and combat are no’—I can’t . . . is it, repair? No, reprieve—‘are no reprieve? When she thinks of the future does she see only me, as I see only her? Not only me versus other men, no no no, but me versus
everything.
Me
only,
the way the moon covers the sun in an eclipse.’” And then would come Micah, fifty times worse: “‘In my eyes there is only Leo Vakolyuk.’” (“Leer Vac-you-luck,” in her hillbilly pronunciation.) “‘I breathe you, I hear you, I am more closely attached to you than I am to God (you will object to this but I can only speak heart’s truth). You say I am brave. I am not! It’s just that my fears are all concentrated. Facing a day without a letter from you, facing the thought of losing you—this and only this is what produces genuine terror.’” Because Micah objected to Matty sticking his finger down his throat to pantomime retching, he’d taken to plugging in his earbuds to drown the readings with scads of Russian death-metal. But you could only endure so much of chainsmoking while watching human beings—one of them, for fuck’s sake, your old ace boon coon, your best friend—melting themselves down to pathetic candlelit puddles via their self-enacted dumpster soap opera. With his new laptop, Matty figured, he’d be able to download a gazillion movies from filesharing sites. (He’d scored the wifi password from the bar down the street, whose signal was intermittently hijackable in one corner of the living room.) And it’d be good to have porn back in his life—by now he’d exhausted his mental fantasy reel of Asian chicks polishing his knob.

But a display stack of new cellphones by the entrance brought him to a sudden standstill. He dug his own phone from his pocket for comparison. It was stupidly outdated; was the same phone, in fact, they’d returned to him after his nine-month vacation at the Oregon State Penitentiary, and the phone had been obsolete even before his arrest. (You could play Tetris on it, but that was it for games.) He browsed the new phones, which were tethered to the display by a plastic-coated metal wire, but after a while a look of befuddlement darkened his face; he needed a prepayable phone, with no calling plan, and he couldn’t tell which models qualified. The last thing he wanted was employee attention—his goal was to get in and out quick, because until now he’d stuck to petty shit, shoes and skateboard gear and Yankees tickets, and he suspected he was promoting himself to felony level today; plus he was
really
flouting Monya’s rules now, though, the way he saw it, Monya didn’t understand the situation he had on his hands, didn’t know Matty had lucked into a Supercard that wanted to give and give and give—but without knowing which phones were available with the prepay option he was screwed. He submitted to a salesman’s offer of assistance.

With his spectacularly round shape and blue shirt and matching blue pants, the salesman resembled a globe on which the continents had been erased, or, as Micah would probably put it, a globe representing the apocalyptic future when warmed risen seas would swamp the earth. His cheeks were the size and color of pink grapefruits. He steered Matty toward a Nokia phone he called an “excellent convergence device,” confusing Matty with an appended chuckle. Matty felt compelled to ask, “Is that a real thing—a convergence device?” The salesman chuckled again and said, “You know what movie
that’s
from.” Matty didn’t, because nine months in prison followed by nine months in an unelectrified squat had left him culturally bankrupt, but he pretended to anyway. Real or not, he liked the sound of a convergence device, and the phone’s price was a mid-range $149. “Sold,” he told the salesman, who wiggled his hands in the air and exclaimed “all
riiiight!
” in what Matty understood to be another movie quotation. Dude was kind of funny; Matty liked him.

He admitted he’d come for a new laptop when the salesman asked if there was anything else. “Walk this way,” the salesman said, and with a goofily hunched back led Matty deeper into the store. Matty was pleased, this time, to get the reference: that was from
Young Frankenstein,
an oldie his Grandma Boone used to shove into the VCR when she’d babysit him. Matty’s plan was to keep the purchase under a grand, which was the line he’d drawn in his head between grand and petit larceny, based on a guess. Just a bare-bones laptop; nothing ostentatious. But as the salesman pointed out, the $799 model Matty was eyeing didn’t have anywhere near the hard-drive capacity for storing movies, and when Matty said battery life was an issue the salesman snorted and claimed the battery would die long before he’d get to “see any bad guys killed.” Plus, he added, could you really
enjoy
a movie on a fourteen-inch “peephole” screen? One by one they dismissed their way through the laptops until they came to an HP model called the “Dragon,” with a twenty-inch high-def display and four gigabytes of RAM plus this bad-assed adjustable screen-hinge with which you could move the screen closer or farther from you, depending on—on something, Matty wasn’t sure what, but it was cool. He kept moving it back and forth, test-driving the hinge, while the salesman disclosed bonus details about a new filesharing site with hyperspeed servers where he claimed you could find
every movie ever made,
probably even
White on Rice III
or
The Girls of the Whore-ient Express,
Matty thought to himself, reserving this tip for future investigation. But the price was crazy:
batshit
crazy. He couldn’t even bear to look at it. The salesman had a point, however, even if he wasn’t aware it was his point: Why take the risk Matty was taking on a machine that wasn’t worth it? He played with the hinge some more, watching his own reflection in the glossy black screen receding and returning as he wormed his way into the idea. This would be the last time, he promised himself. He’d chop that life-giving Supercard into little plastic shards the moment he got home.

The total with phone and taxes came to $4,654.30. Matty gulped, declining the service protection program. This was so much more—obscenely more—than he’d intended to spend, and for a frenzied blood-pounding moment he heard a voice which might well have been Daniel Boone’s saying:
Get the fuck outta here, dude. Do a facepalm, say you forgot your wallet, and walk right out the door.
But like a big blue stray puppy the salesman had followed Matty all the way up to the register, where the female cashier turned out to be (fuck!) a first-day trainee, and because the salesman wouldn’t shut up about how cool
Spider-Man 3
was going to look on that dual-lamp screen (Matty didn’t even like Spider-Man), his pinched and quotation-larded voice adding a scrambled top layer to the fierce argument Matty was conducting inside his head, wise old Daniel Boone squaring off against the desire for that techno-wicked hinge thing, Matty wasn’t fully aware as he handed his credit card and fake ID to the cashier. Not until scrunching her face and rotating the card swipe machine sideways she asked: “What does this mean?” When the salesman leaned in with a squint, Matty noticed his nametag, in particular the words
ASSISTANT MANAGER
: whoops. “Oh that,” the salesman-turned-manager said. “That just means call for authorization.” This was Matty’s whistle to make a fast but smooth beeline for the doors, a whistle he obeyed. The giant black security guard nodded as Matty passed, smiling, “Have a nice day.”

Which he might’ve had, if not for the fake ID he’d left on the counter. The one Monya had supplied him, courtesy of a mole inside the Brighton Beach DMV office, with Elwin Cross’s name printed beside his own unmistakably fat-bearded face which even the most rudimentary face-recognition software (he’d seen this shit on TV) would link instantly back to his Oregon State Penitentiary file photos, or that any downtown beat cop (oh why the fuck hadn’t he gone uptown?) could put to quick spotting use. With his hands gripping the bar of the door Matty froze. He needed that back. After a quick and energizing inhalation, he spun around and dashed back to the counter, snatching his ID just as the manager threw some kind of signal to the guard. His two-handed, index-fingers-pointed-inward motion was weird, and probably a physical movie quote, but regardless of its origins it still transmitted the same message to Matty: He was
fucked.
The guard was on him like a three-hundred-pound land octopus. “I’m clean, dude, check me,” Matty protested, “my girlfriend just texted me—she got hit—by a bus,” but the guard wasn’t listening. Matty heard the manager tell the cashier to dial the police. He also heard her ask how.