Cannibals in Love (31 page)

The joke itself was entertaining, and, more to the point, a reason to keep talking to Danielle. But I had no interest in writing the Great American Screenplay. The truth was I had already begun to double down on my book. In the midst of all this hand-wringing down in Texas, I had discovered the first good reason in years to carry on with
A Cattle, a Crack-Up.
I was determined to turn this book into a one-thousand-page novel. This was a number that could not be ignored. Credibility had always been an issue, and what was more incredible than a thousand fucking pages!

Danielle, to her credit, was against it. She had read a myriad of drafts over the last nine months, and she was convinced that it still worked best as a short story. She said that I should publish that, and cut bait for a while. It was time for me to start something new. But I was certain she was wrong. I had come too far with this book to abandon it in a dozen loose-leaf pages. No one reads short stories, besides. And while it's true that the readership for one-thousand-page novels might be even smaller, at least that audience was
elite
. And if no one was going to read the thing, then why not go for broke? I wanted to give people a book that they could defend themselves with in a fight. I wanted to write a novel that you could crack somebody's skull with.

*   *   *

But this ugly and ferocious desire for
more
did not manifest itself out of nothing. I was embarrassed to admit that I was almost twenty-three years old before anyone bothered to tell me that Joyce Carol Oates was a native of Lockport. Joyce Carol Oates, who had published more than forty novels and won the National Book Award. Joyce Carol Oates, who had taught writing at Princeton University for over four decades. Joyce Carol Oates, who had once graced the cover of
Newsweek
magazine as a writer of
fiction
!

Joyce Carol Oates was from the same nowhere town as
me
. The lapse in this detail was astounding. I felt angry and exhilarated to find it out only in adulthood. It was as if they had conspired to keep it away from me, for my own good. Not that it would've changed anything, obviously. But it's the fact of not being told something so seminal about the place where you are from that feels so galling. It was like trying to imagine a world in which no one bothered to tell you that Timothy McVeigh was from Lockport. Which, of course, he was.

Lane, for his part, claimed to have no idea who Joyce Carol Oates was, or why it possibly mattered. Lane was interested in Timothy McVeigh. He was fascinated by the fact that the Oklahoma City Bomber could be from my hometown. He'd begun badgering me to make a video with him about this. Lane had the idea that we could visit this monster in his super-max cell, in rural Indiana. He wanted me to interview McVeigh on camera about his memories of Lockport. Just Lockport and nothing else. Every little thing that this man might remember about the place we had in common. The smaller the detail the better, Lane told me.

“Dude,” I said. “Timothy McVeigh is dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yeah. They executed his ass.”

“When?”

“I don't know when. A long time ago.”

I watched Lane take this in. “Huh. Well, good fucking riddance, then.”

“Yeah.”

“We'll just think of something else.”

*   *   *

I was amazed to find that Lane wasn't simply bugging out on his iPhone. He knew exactly what he was trying to do. He was watching scenes develop in the world. Encounters, really. Everything seemed to revolve around a moment of conflict for Lane. Couples fighting; babies crying; a group of teenagers swearing loudly in a parking lot. But these pieces could get altogether scarier, too. He had videos of dogs barking, and buildings burning, and paramedics loading dead bodies into ambulances.

Lane, I was amused to find, was turning into something of a big deal as a video artist. He'd been showing me segments from an unfinished piece on PTSD, which he had sold to
Vice
magazine on commission. There was one particular image of a young soldier in a grocery store that I could not shake. This plainclothes GI who was berating a middleaged man in the frozen foods aisle. The civilian, it seemed, was guilty of touching the soldier lightly on the back, in order to squeeze behind him into the refrigerated cooler. I could still see the GI pulling up like a scared cat, as he snapped around on the other man, asking point-blank why he had touched him.

And in this moment it seemed clear to me that the two men knew each other. I thought for certain that they were playing out this scenario as a joke. The gray-haired man froze for a beat, before smiling in recognition. But this was no joke.

“Is something funny to you?” the soldier asked.

“Excuse me?” the befuddled man asked, waffles well in hand now.

“You put your hands on me, without permission, and now you're laughing at me.”

“Hey. Take it easy, buddy.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are? You touch me without my knowledge, without my permission?”

The older man seized up, refusing to answer. He was imagining the worst now, you could see it. He was desperately looking for a way out of this situation.

“You're some sort of fucking tough guy, huh? Is that it?” The soldier was becoming increasingly frantic. Puffing himself up for a fight. “C'mon. Touch me again. I fucking dare you.”

But the older man was gone. Keeping his eyes on the floor as he hurried away. This was the guy that Lane's camera followed. Tracking him down the aisle, before the phone jostled and cut to black. The whole thing was less than a minute long and it made me sick to my stomach.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah.” Lane nodded. “I have tons of these. It happens all the time.”

*   *   *

I had started getting tired of coming home to an empty house, though. The dog didn't count. There was something pathetic and demoralizing about having to hurry home to take Shawn's dog around the block and pick up his shit. I complained about this one time and the dog disappeared. Shawn was just as happy to take him with her, I learned. Letting him sit in on classes. Bringing him along to lectures and workshops.

And so I got what I wanted, and I was left all alone again. But I couldn't tell if I was better off or not. Shawn and the dog would disappear for days at a time now; coming home late at night, and sneaking in, long after I'd gone to bed. The whole thing took on the framework of an affair.

But Shawn and I had bigger problems. We found it impossible to live together. I wanted a space where I could spread out and work, but she could not seem to grant me that. Shawn, I learned, was sneaky. She was nosy. From the moment we moved in, I would find her rifling my desk or opening files on my computer. She had no compunction about leafing through the notebooks on my nightstand, demanding to know what it all meant. Shawn was convinced that I was writing about her.

“I'm writing about cows,” I said mildly.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don't know. It's a bad joke. It doesn't mean anything anymore.”

“I don't understand what you're trying to tell me.”

“Nothing. Don't even worry about it. You wouldn't like the book anyway.”

“How do you know? I wanna read it,” she demanded.

“It's not fucking done!” I said, losing my patience.

These fights were always meant to escalate. Shawn and I didn't know what to make of each other now. It felt strange to find ourselves occupying the same house, the same bed. There was a fixed feeling of claustrophobia that pervaded our apartment. We were almost never fighting about the things that we were fighting about. There was something else below the surface, always. Something curdling. Something that made us pity and resent the other person. And then one day Shawn admitted that she was feeling insecure about Danielle.

“Danielle?” I asked. “You don't even know Danielle. What is there to possibly feel insecure about?”

“You tell me,” she said, laying it down in front of me like a devastating playing card. I couldn't help but feel exposed.

“What are you talking about? Are you reading my
texts
?”

“Can you blame me?” she asked, without shame.

“Are you insane? You're fucking spying on me!”

Shawn got teary-eyed then. “How am I supposed to feel? You won't even let me read your book, but you send it to
her
a dozen fucking times!”

“Jesus Christ! Are you reading my
emails
, too?”

“You're the one who leaves it open,” she said pityingly.

I could barely process what was happening here. I didn't even know what she had on me. Shawn could've gone through ten years' worth of emails, for all I knew.

“I just want to know what's going on. I just want to understand what I've gotten myself into. I mean, I'm not even sure that I can trust you.”

“You can't trust me?” I laughed.

“I never lied!” she screamed.

“I'm not having this fucking conversation,” I said, desperately trying to walk away. I was furious. But Shawn kept following me from room to room.

“You're in love with another girl.”

“Fuck you.”

“Admit it!” Shawn seemed determined to corner me in this lie. If only I would admit that I was still in love with Danielle we could end this whole charade and walk away. But I didn't want to do that. I didn't even know if it was true.

“Do you know what your problem is, Shawn?” I asked, turning on her now. “It's that you secretly want to fuck your dog.”

Well, that pretty much did it. She practically shoved me through the door. Out onto the front porch, and into the heavy insect-heat of night.

*   *   *

I was pretty sure that I was done with Austin then. I had tried and failed, and the world had cut me loose one more time. Except that I didn't know where I was supposed to go instead. Danielle, for her part, seemed strangely underwhelmed, and almost disappointed, by the fact that I could not hold things together with Shawn.

“You're not coming back here, are you?”

“I don't know,” I answered. And I didn't.

“Okay,” she said warily.

Danielle only liked me in a box, I thought. Miserable and alone. With a terrible girlfriend. Two thousand miles away. This was the only way she was prepared to deal with me. And so we stopped texting once again.

The only person who took any of this in stride, at all, was Lane. He couldn't care less if I got back together with Shawn. He didn't even remember who Danielle was. He just wanted me to stay in Texas. And the truth was, I was scared to death of rushing back into something stupid. Besides, I sort of lived here now. Austin was a place I knew. I had stopped fighting the heat and made my peace with it. My body had adjusted.

Maritza, in particular, was insistent that I stay. “Lane likes you, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “I like Lane, too.”

“No, but he really likes you. And Lane doesn't like
anybody
,” she said with a smile.

“Good,” I said. “That makes me happy.”

*   *   *

I had come to appreciate these afternoons spent swimming with Lane and the baby. The water had a kind of spiritual effect, I thought. It was an answer, even briefly, to the incessant question of leaving. Sitting there on the scorched lawn, watching the girls pass by in their motley bikinis. Watching Bruno, the
Amazing Swimming Baby
, as he picked out the pretty ones and smiled at them. Freezing them, just long enough to stop, and laugh, and talk with us.

“Is there anyone else we know who has a kid?” I asked.

“Just Lauren,” Lane said, tossing it off.

“Lauren who?”

“Lauren who-do-you-think?”

“Lauren Pinkerton?”

“Not anymore. She changed her name.”

“Changed her name to
what
?”

“Whatever her husband's name is,” Lane said, shrugging.

“Oh,” I said, trying to process all of this. “Right. And they have a baby now?”

“More or less. I mean, she's definitely pregnant.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding slowly. It never even occurred to me that Lane and Lauren would be in contact. But why wouldn't they be, of course? They had a lot in common, really. “You still talk to Lauren, then?”

“Yes and no. We're friends on Facebook,” Lane offered blithely. “Do you wanna see a picture of her?” He was already bringing it up on his phone.

“No. Not really,” I said, looking away. And I didn't.

*   *   *

I had actually received an email from Lauren Pinkerton the previous Christmas. I didn't know what to make of it, honestly. She was reaching out to me in a state of distress.
I'm writing this with tears in my eyes
, the first line read.

But this wasn't really Lauren Pinkerton. This was just a piece of spam. I recognized the template immediately. The tortured syntax. The dormant Hotmail account. Even the subject line, announcing “Very Sad News,” tipped me off to its fraudulence. I knew all of these tropes by heart. But none of that stopped me from reading it eagerly just the same.

My family and I have come here to London, United Kingdom for a short vacation. But unfortunately we have been mugged at the park near our hotel. All of our cash, credit cards, and cellular phones have been stolen from us. Luckily we have retained our passports.

We have visited the embassy and the police station, but they are not helping matters. Our return flight is leaving soon, and we are still facing many difficulties. The hotel manager says he will not allow us to check out until we can settle these bills. We are stranded here in London, UK without our finances. I am freaked out at the moment, as you can see. Please help me. Love, Lauren.