Jeremy Thrane (14 page)

“You’re too thin anyway,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose. “That’s not what he says. Sometimes I think he should go pick up girls in, like, Biafra or Cuba, one of those third world starvation countries.”

We ate everything, leaving on our plates piles of limp rosemary-flecked yellow chicken skin, sucked-clean bones, sucked-clean olive pits, and a crust or two of bread. Amanda pushed her plate away and lit a cigarette, exhaling a stream of smoke that curled around the objects on the tabletop. I felt less like an intruder here now that we’d eaten together, some millennia-old tribal breadbreaking thing.

“Amanda darlin, throw me the matches, will you?” called Liam from the living room. Through the arched doorway, I could see him fingering a small heap he’d spilled from a Baggie onto a magazine, separating the seeds and stems out. Amanda tossed a book of matches, which landed at his feet.

Feckin sat next to him on the couch, plucking at a battered old guitar, squinting through the fog of cigarette smoke that swathed his small, ferretlike head. He smoked constantly and joylessly, and seemed to exhale more smoke than normal smokers did. His chain-smoking seemed so much a physical part of him that it seemed insensitive or at least futile to be bothered by it, like wishing someone with a speech impediment would speak correctly, or someone with chronic gas would hold it in.

“Oh yeah, this is a great show comin up here,” Liam said. “They go on dates and then they come on and say, ‘He’s not my type,’ ‘She’s too ugly,’ and they’re all feckin losers who can’t find a date on their own.”

“They should get a feckin life,” said Feckin.

“Losers,” said Liam.

I looked at Amanda, who looked back at me expressionlessly.

“How can they watch that shit all the time?” I said.

“Do you
ever
watch TV?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Admit it, Jeremy, you hate pop culture.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I only hate shit.”

“Does that include my music?”

I paused. I was thrown for a loop. “Why do you think that?” I asked cautiously.

“I asked you on the phone this morning to come to my show and you practically choked.”

“I did?”

She looked at me and sniffed. “You haven’t come to a gig in years. The last time, you left afterward without saying a word. What am I supposed to think?”

“It was two in the morning, and you were backstage.”

“You’ve got a point there,” said Liam, but whether he was talking to me or someone on TV wasn’t entirely clear. I glanced in at him; he was slumped shirtless on the couch. Spider legs of black hair sprang from his shoulders. His skin was luminous in the dim light, the cool, starchy white of the flesh of a potato, the white of chill, damp low-ceilinged row houses, cabbagy sooty air, borderline malnutrition, guilt.

“This one here,” said Feckin smuttily, “this fat black girl here, I’d give her a toss.” He took a big gulp of whatever was in the cup he held, washed it noisily around his mouth before swallowing it. He had a primitive, dissolute face, a fuzz of white-blond hair on his hard skull, thick horn-rimmed glasses, and a waiflike body. His accent was so thick, he often sounded as if he were speaking some language other than English. His real name was Declan McIntyre. He was Liam’s boyhood friend. He had been staying with them now for ten months and showed no signs of going elsewhere. He slept on their couch, drank their whiskey, smoked their pot, watched their TV, and never went out; he even got them to go on cigarette runs for him. Their apartment had taken on during the course of his stay there the loamy, dark, loungy air of a hibernation cave, the accretions of a static life, a life on hold: Cigarette butts lay crushed in a mound in a pool of whiskey on a plate on the coffee table; his seldom-washed body smelled like some hearth dog, warm and moribund; his very indolence emitted a psychic odor, a sense of entitlement, self-romance, negative interestingness, as if by doing nothing at all, by sponging off his friends, by languidly denying forward motion, he set himself apart from the pack. He was the antihero of
his own hermetically sealed world, the nondrama that unspooled only in his own mind, in which he couldn’t be held accountable for anything he said or did. That Amanda and Liam hadn’t asked him to move along was naturally their own fault, but their friendship with him was obviously predicated on their willingness to tolerate him as he was.

“Ech, you’re so full of it,” said Liam, shaking his big, shaggy head with its black-Irish mat of hair. “You potato-eating bugger.”

“And what does that make you?”

Amanda had picked up the lighter and was examining the blonde on it, who had stretched her little thong up around her waist to outline the cleft of her crotch. She flicked the flame to life and held it to one of the green peppers until its flesh began to scorch. I could tell by the set of her face that she was not going to speak until I did.

I said earnestly, “Amanda, believe me, I’m really looking forward to hearing you guys tomorrow night.”

She pulled another cigarette from her bathrobe pocket, lit it, and inhaled. “Don’t do me any favors,” she said, squinting. She was getting crow’s-feet, I noticed with a pang. My little sister. “Just so you don’t run away like a scared bunny afterward.”

“A scared bunny,” I repeated, laughing uneasily, beset by a somewhat dismaying image of a large, white, pink-eyed creature darting for the safety of its lettuce patch. Apparently, she’d struck a nerve.

After sunrise, I got up to get a drink of water. Through the kitchen window the sky was a low greenish-yellow smudge; according to the sunburst clock on the wall, it was just past seven o’clock. The slice of Manhattan I could see through a hectic grid of clotheslines and power lines looked small, dirty, and exhausted. I heard truck gears grinding a block away on Metropolitan Avenue, then the high, churning roar of the engine pulling its load away from the light. Right before I’d woken up, I had been dreaming that I was trying to escape from an unseen but menacing attacker; my stubborn mule of a body wouldn’t budge no matter how hard my mind flogged it. I felt as if I were moving my dream-legs through taffy or sludge while my mind raced on ahead.

Going back along the hall, I saw that Feckin had passed out on the
couch with his boots on. His bony ankles showed fishbelly pale between his pant cuffs and his boot tops. He lay under his overcoat with his face buried in a pillow, his nose squashed, his hand dangling off the side. His snores were soft, without aggression, little percussive grunts and sighs. Naturally, he preferred the seeming transience of sleeping on a couch to installing himself in the bourgeois confines of a bedroom, for which he’d have to pay rent, thus becoming just another ordinary working guy.

I lay awake in the absolute darkness of Amanda’s windowless little studio, waiting for morning, sure I’d never go back to sleep. The room smelled of her perfume. I imagined her in here, sitting on the futon I was lying on, picking out chords, humming melodies, turning her little tape recorder on and off, cursing when a string broke. The room was filled with cassette tapes and pieces of paper with scraps written on them; I thought about turning on the light again and examining these clues to my sister’s inner life, about which I knew almost nothing, but then I realized that I didn’t want to know the humid, earnest little phrases Amanda had snatched out of the ether and written down, the insipid aphorisms that had floated up from the magic eight-ball window in her head. Just before I fell asleep I realized I was falling asleep and almost jerked awake again, but a surprise riptide pulled me under and I was gone.

I awoke at noon feeling hung over and wretchedly sad. Everyone else was still asleep, so I crept out and found some local hipster’s recreation of an old-timey coffee shop. It had speckled Formica counters and tabletops, cracked leatherette booths and laminated menus, thick white crockery and pies turning in a case, but there was a self-conscious air of “authenticity” about it all that made it impossible to relax here; customers and waitstaff alike were on display just like the pies, almost all of them well under twenty-five and as aggressively, ethnically antibeautiful as a magazine fashion spread. I sat meekly in one of the booths and was immediately served a cup of coffee so strong it blasted the inside of my mouth. I ordered some eggs, then rummaged around in my canvas bag and pulled out the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey. I turned to the introduction, which informed me that “the mention of Turkey conjures up vague, stereotypical visions of Oriental splendor and decadence,
of mystery and intrigue, of sultans and harems, of luxury and wickedness in the minds of most Western visitors. These outdated stereotypes quickly evaporate once the visitor arrives in the country.”

Although I had never been to Turkey, I didn’t need to go there to write authoritatively about it, thanks to the thoroughness of the Lonely Planet guide’s descriptions. I had been using the book as a geographical and cultural aid to create my own version of Turkey the same way I conjured a fictional Angus out of blurry memories. In so doing, I shamelessly perpetrated these myths and even invented new ones; Angus’s Don Quixote—like political beliefs sent him through a hookah-blurred paradise of mint tea, dusky girls dressed like Barbara Eden, incense-laden marketplaces and alleys, bleached-white towns spilling down steep hillsides to the Aegean. I also used Turkey as a metaphorical Biblical land in which my father played out his messianic delusions: Efes boasted one of the seven churches of the apocalypse, coincidentally or not. Marxist fanaticism was political in nature, but Christian in mood and texture; what was bloody revolution if not ultimately a kind of apocalypse? Both Christian and Marxist trajectories progressed from the violent destruction of all heathens and heretics to a gathering of all true believers into a perfect society of shared common property, transcendent common good, freedom from individual gain and egotistical self-interest. The primary difference was that there was no Messiah, but my Angus was trying to fulfill that role as well as he could, even down to his martyred end.

Whoever my father had been, the fictional Angus Heyerdahl was a scruffy guy with a self-administered haircut, piercing blue eyes, an elusive low-key affability that was entirely illusory. The first section, “Hangdog,” began in California, when he cracked up and left everyone and everything he’d ever known and signed up as crew on a freighter to Istanbul, bringing with him into exile only his volumes of Marx, sleeping bag, tent and a few clothes, and the cash he’d taken from the commune’s bank account, which he justified by telling himself he’d left them his house in return. He gave very little thought to the fatherless future to which he was consigning his three children; being a Marxist was the perfect alibi for the would-be absentee deadbeat dad, since family ties were considered completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of revolution and social equality; in fact, inasmuch as I understood the Marxist take
on families, they weren’t supposed to get in the way of your ideals at all, ever.

In Chapter Two, when Angus got to Efes, he established himself in a campsite in an orange grove in Selcuk, began what would turn out to be a years-long affair with Oya, the daughter of the campground’s owner, lunched every day in the local kofte joint, where he quickly learned enough Turkish to argue with his newfound like-minded Commie cronies over beer and grilled lamb at night. To Angus, born and raised in Minnesota, this was paradise, and he had a great time kicking back in the sun during the brief hiatus before his idealistic pathologies re-emerged and subsumed him. In the middle section, “Heresy,” he tried to reconcile his pure beliefs with the political realities of his exile as he rose through the ranks of Turkey’s strong Marxist underground. Of course, there was no possibility of a happy finish to this novel; the only ending Angus would have approved of would have been a successful revolution and the establishment of a socialist government, but he was doomed by his archetypal messianic role. In the final, as yet unwritten pages of the last section, “Blood,” I planned that he would overstep his bounds, piss off the wrong people, and be violently killed in a remote village by members of a fanatic Muslim religious group during the political unrest and civil infighting of 1980. His corpse would be left by the side of a dirt road to be eaten by vultures. On one level, this could be viewed as my private revenge on the bastard for ditching me, but it also made sense in terms of the book itself. Fanatics came to no good end and dogma got you nowhere: If that wasn’t a major theme in this novel, then I was Marie of Romania.

After I’d polished off my greasy breakfast, I fished out a notebook and pen and got to work. It was interesting, writing in longhand, sort of like cutting grass with an old rotary mower. The physical effort it took was half the fun, gripping the pen and forcibly imprinting crabbed letters onto unyielding paper instead of fluidly tapping keys and watching ribbons of words stream silkily across a computer screen. I forgot where I was; it was as if I were encased and suspended in a temporal bubble like an egg developing in a sac. Ideas and words came into my mind and passed through it onto the paper, and meanwhile, outside, nothing changed, nothing happened.

In the scene I wrote, Angus tried to enlist the sympathies of a man named Akbil, the owner of a bakery who edited a Marxist newspaper and held a lot of sway in the political underground. This Akbil was a gigantic man with bulging forearms and a square head. When Angus asked him what he thought about the likelihood of establishing a Marxist government in Turkey, he expostulated in broken but forcible English that Marxism had to be introduced gradually through the system, not imposed from without by outsiders. Change happened in its own time; there was no forcing things. The individual had no power over the course of history. Angus countered that the recent activism and protests in the States had proved this wrong, and that the only way to freedom lay in fomenting a revolution through demonstrations, dissemination of information, and grassroots coalitions.

“And then what,” spat out the baker, “then you have a new government and nothing changes.”