American Spirit: A Novel (33 page)

It all seemed like a giant welcome to better living until a buffet table being politely descended upon by above-average people jumps up at Matthew like it’s spring-loaded; like a prank reserved for rubes in here on a free upgrade. A giant wooden bowl of crabs jumps at the face and plants itself right on and into it. The head says:
Oh, shit, the pills have gained ground and turned the place into one big seafood fun house.
At first, the humiliation is too much to bear. The head wants to end it all, wants to disappear; it wasn’t a bad idea, that idea in the hospital today of conning a sweet anesthesiologist into administering enough to slow the body down forever until the mortal shell was on permanent vacation. Then the heart rallies verve, understanding too clearly that days are limited and one day gone, and that it was absolutely a bad idea to hope to leave the planet early from that hospital today. Sure, the blood is thick with chemical debris fueling this spirited revelation, but there’s also a certain inspired mood that comes of being at a seaside resort after a sunny day spent indoors falling in love with an anesthesiologist whose American name is Steve, while the beautiful ghost of your young mother looked on with her blessing.

And that’s the mood Matthew is in, plus yes, Tylenol with codeine and a big Bintang beer—but the foundation of the
mood, it has nothing to do with the pills and Bintang. The effect is that one is finally too exhausted to continue spending life’s very finite remaining balance being polite and afraid; hold it all together long enough and one is finally cornered into confidence. And on that day, you may find yourself flat on your face in a bowl of tasty crabs. When this happens, eat the fucking crab! If chemical gravity and sway has landed one’s face in the bowl, then it is no fault of one’s own; it is simply the great, big, delicious mistake of science and medicine.

Will guests look on? Yes, they will look on; for that matter guests are looking on right now, right this very moment. Go ahead, pull your head up in between taking bites, and look at them; there they are, fattened by years of steady flow, staring back. Normal people are everywhere now, it seems. There must’ve been a time when it wasn’t so. The head is through with worrying what they think:
That’s right, folks, stare all you want, this is the splendor and horror that’s available to you; hell, it’s coming for you. You only have to wait; it’s that easy to sign up. All you need to do is let years march on the way they do, slow in their brutality with you, forcing your hand, getting rid of all your stupid plans.

Matthew stops eating for just a minute, turns and musters saying something to the man backing away from the buffet table, right to the water’s edge: “Don’t look so appalled, lady—you wish you were doing the same thing. You’ve been living for people you’ve never met; people who won’t be by your bed when you take your last breath.”

Another trophy man next to a trophy wife, this one at the very end of the long table, still piles a plate full, looks up suddenly at the commotion. Matthew hears himself saying this: “That’s right, get a taste of that before I get over there. Because when the bear gets there, it’s over. It’s done, that shit’s mine. I’ll spend the first bite on your arm to back you down. This combo they’ve got me on for nut pain is savage and strange. I’m a bull, all kicked in the sack and agitated to the point of fighting; I never had it in me like this. I was always a flight guy, but you can’t be and survive, not in America, not anymore. Maybe in your Australia you can turn the other cheek, get by in that desert of yours on rotten meat and dreams, but it isn’t that way where I live. Around the world, thugs storm mosques and discos, so I’m taking this. Under God’s sky, tiny hearts stop beating on ultrasound screens, or worse, kids are born with diseases that should’ve been cured a billion dollars ago. None of it’s fucking fair—they don’t tell you that when you’re young, they let you catch on slowly, maybe by the time you’re thirty. If you knew how stacked the deck was when you were young, you’d stab half the neighborhood in a fit, so they let it ride awhile, they watch you and see if you’re getting it yet. They feed you sitcoms and cartoon strips about desperadoes with funny glasses and big bald heads and expressionless faces in cubicle graves, so you feel better about being fucked by days that you refuse to take as your own. So I’m taking this tortellini seafood salad as my own. And I’m taking your gin. Yum, yum, yum, the bear got into camp, motherfuckers. The bear was upgraded; the bear
brought an American Express Platinum to a MasterCard Gold fight. And a bear’s gonna eat, you know what I mean? I got here selling shit in parking lots. But I got here, didn’t I? And now you have to face me.”

What Matthew is actually slurring in a loud whisper is this: “This—the noodle… pasta thing? Fuuuuuck. Mmm.”

The trophy wife is smiling—smiling! Her eyes lit with delight that she’s trying to hide whenever it seems like the trophy husband might look her way by chance. She’s the only person not frightened, inconvenienced, or disgusted, and nobody notices. So, right, the first savvy travel tip is about these buffet situations, and the second savvy travel tip is this: One should not attempt to print, sign, and FedEx contracts for coffee-mug distribution in gigantic American urban outfitting chain stores from a hotel’s so-called business center under the sway of a long, strange day. Because even though it all works out just fine, there are myriad humiliations awaiting, including but not limited to having a cute young woman wipe drool from the margin of a contract you are signing. Aside from those two tips, do as you will while in Bali, mystic land of enchantment.

There was so much email. Weeks old, even older, some of it. Replies were attempted and some even sent—a nap between the buffet situation and the visit to the business center had made things a little easier to navigate. There was a woman in there too, bored to tears, stuck in paradise manning a hotel’s business center. Not much was said; the mouth had done its work for the day, and a sterling performance
at that. There was the business of hellos exchanged and the woman didn’t say anything past that, really, just looked at Matthew and looked away whenever he glanced her way. The post-buffet stretch was tough to read, and either a language barrier was at play or she had heard about Matthew’s new approach to resort dining and was unsure about saying much to Matthew and triggering an episode of some sort. It’s nice, though, to have that kind of distance from people when trying to think straight; one can’t be too hard on oneself for creating a little space on vacation like this; for putting a few layers between one’s self and the upper-middle-class riffraff.

There was an email from Tim, a personal advisory of sorts. Tim’s life-coach act, when he lapses into it, is now undermined by living in a park with a leathery, shoplifting, amphibious hashish fiend and another man wearing a dead animal for a robe and giving the world the silent treatment. The message was a bold chorus of one man, though, and it was a big gesture, Tim likely having taken the time to duck into some concrete Injun Trading Outpost and Café staffed by white people to send word on an ancient charged-by-the-hour PC. It’s not the first time Tim has said to move on from Kristin, but mostly the ears and eyes have been trained pretty well to not register Tim’s previous suggestions in the arena of love. For a month or two after his head was shaved by the sex worker with the violent disposition and the suitcase of prosthetic penises or whatever she brought to bear on him, Tim was pretty quiet when it came to advising anyone in matters of the heart. But now he’s back to having elected
himself the harbinger of personal growth. The email from Tim was the usual stuff, but maybe not, at least in that things seemed to be wrapping up.

Greetings, Fellow Doomed! Guess what, I’m tired of being lost in a park that’s supposed to be so goddamned simple. If nature is such a perfect system, why can’t it make it clear what the hell state I’m in? One person tells me we’re in Montana, the next person says Idaho, the next swears up and down that it’s Wyoming. I am starting to get the impression one could drink a bottle of fortified strawberry wine, get in the rig, and do a doughnut that would swing her ass end through terra firma belonging to all three states. So I did just that, on sort of a dare from myself, Chief. I’ve generally been getting my act together but I allowed myself one lapse into the powder and booted it up with some strawberry wine thing that Tic liberated from the minimarket a couple days after you left and we went out of the park to refuel. Modoch is pouting about my behavior, big surprise, but Tic Tac tells me, LAUGHING HIS ASS OFF, that I was literally, technically, swinging the ass end of the rig through all three states. It was loud. Things got loud after you left and I allowed myself one last dance with the demons inside me to get a few things straight with them. Anyway, I was drinking and searching for some answers, and had jumped in the rig to do doughnuts and blow off steam. And that’s when the heat rolled up strong with their beef again. The same guy that crawled all over me for defending myself against wildlife up at Canyon Falls when I accidentally smacked
the neighboring camper (again, his fault, snuck up on me) but he’s with a new guy none of us have seen. They cooled off real fast when they saw the company I’m keeping these days. Modoch assured the ranger that I’ve been making spiritual progress of sorts. Tic Tac made some crack to the new guy about how he might want to go back to his shed or barrel or wherever they kept him. Then Tic stood right there and told me to get back in the rig and do it again, do another doughnut in the thing, but I felt pretty lousy after they had to strong-arm and scare the park screws, who were just doing their job, so I said I wasn’t up for it and that we would tone things down for the rest of the night. New ground for me, am I right? Modoch saw the progress in my feeling remorse, I think. Tic Tac just got drunker and very silent and sad. He looked, believe it or not, like a little boy whose birthday party had been shut down early on account of bad behavior. Like a little kid who was told he was getting nothing but coal for Christmas. My heart broke, it really did. So I said, “Oh, what the fuck,” screwed up my nerve, gave him a wink, and fired the steel horse up and let ’er rip all over that field again. And, get this: I ROLLED THE GODDAMN THING! Little bit of a bind, to say the least, Chief. The boys kept me out of the worst of it. They told me to get all of my shit out of the RV and stuff it up in whatever rucksack I had, and Tic made an anonymous call to the ranger from the park call box, and then we all hid on the other side of the river there. When three guys from RV Rents USA came into the park along with a big diesel tow truck to winch the beast off her side and drag her back up onto the road, Tic Tac jumped up out of
our little foxhole over on the far side of The Madison, his face was all camouflaged with moss and barbecue charcoal and shit, and he power-walked across the river the way only former military assassins can. It was worth the price of admission, even though I haven’t had to pay admission since picking these two up in July. No clue what Tic Tac said to the RV guys, but they decided to kindly drag their goddamned top-heavy, overpowered RV out of the park before it killed somebody, tow it back to their lot in Bozeman, and that would be the end of it; no harm, no foul. Anyway, look, I’ve spent too much time bullshitting here. Here’s the thing: it was great seeing you but now there’s something I haven’t said since the day you got married: don’t do this. Don’t keep hanging on, Chief, move on, she was never the one. I can say that now without getting the hassle I got from your in-laws when they MADE AN EFFORT to overhear me when I was telling you the same thing DISCREETLY at your wedding. It doesn’t matter what went south, doesn’t matter if you were married too fast or looking for a mother, it doesn’t matter if the boy got married but the man stayed longing and looking for trouble, it only matters that you stop living like she’s still at home with you, because she hasn’t been for a long time. You’ve been alone in that house too long, probably still convinced she’s upstairs or in the other room. Take down some of the pictures on the walls, change your screensaver, quit calling her your wife in conversation, it’s been over a year. I bet if I got you up on fire mountain with Modoch doing a ceremony I could get you to admit it’s been two or three years, but I’m done here and by the time you
dodge two more of my calls, I’ll be headed back to Manhattan to face the music. And by music I mean the Federal Fucking Trade Commission and a long list of people who would probably like their money back.

Signed, the only family you’ve got, whether you like it or not—

T

There was more mail from Tatiana saying essentially that things are complicated in her life, but that maybe they’re not as complicated as she thinks. A still relatively young man has to count it as a plus when a beautiful woman doesn’t run screaming from the hotel in which blood is urinated onto her by accident. And not only does Tatiana not run, but she lies on the bed to watch television documentaries about geniuses and says she has a hunch that the man has a touch of brilliance, even after this terrible mishap in the shower that would seem evidence of the contrary. This is a solid partner in crime, this is not some Miss Minor League Come and Go. Aside from positing the idea that life was complicated but maybe not, Tatiana’s email spoke of having business to tend to for herself and Matthew. Because when a cute vampire actor uses Twitter FaceLink to post a picture of a fellow cute vampire actor drinking coffee out of a mug that says,
It starts out cute and then it gets ugly
across it, there are millions of girls in millions of bedrooms in front of millions of computers trying to find that mug in a mall, even though most of them probably don’t drink coffee. There is email from Jim Montgomery, executive director of The Norwalk Developmental
Work Training Center. It is a note saying, basically: “It is the future I got wolf blood powers Jim is full of shit.”

This must mean that Chris figured out how to email Matthew on Jim Montgomery’s computer. But there won’t be much time for hijinks, there won’t be time for much more than producing and boxing mugs and mugs and mugs. Chris will be thrilled to learn that there is a rush on for millions more now that there is a distribution contract and the matter of this Internet picture situation. The head reels at the idea of it all. The kind of money that Tatiana is talking about in the contract is crazy money. It is the kind of money one works in the middle-management maze of a place like New Time Media for two decades or more to amass. That’s a lot of money today, but it won’t be in the future, it’s a fortune now, but what if one lives to eighty or ninety? Still, there is no better way to be flying back to America than with one’s mug in every magazine on the newsstand, and someone in Los Angeles making sure it is credited and getting more press, and making sure it is licensed and in line for a big advance.