Farewell Navigator (10 page)

What do—

They’re leaving without you. In fact, they
left
.

I thought: He’s carried me this far.

Astrid continued, And he said, I quote:
Bride deserves her punishment.

Why didn’t he ask
you
to go?

He did, last night, at the fireplace place.

They’re going to Alabama next.

I’ve been to Alabama before, she shrugged. Don’t plan to go again.

Why not?

Astrid looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time. She lit two cigarettes and handed one over; it smelled like burnt sugar. Are you going to go home?

I can’t, I said.

Is that so.

Yeah.

Why don’t you go to California?

Is it nice there?

Not necessarily, she said, but people go.

I had maps of California. I knew the mileage from Los Angeles to Mexico. I’d read books about people hopping trains to get to the coast. I don’t think I want to go to California, I admitted.

Astrid paid for a cab that dropped us in front of a café where, she explained, you could sit for as long as you liked without buying anything. Then she said good-bye and went off with her blonde curls swinging.

I sat without buying anything and leafed through my notebook and inspected my finger, which was as clean as the day I was born. The blood had sweated off, the indelible stain erased. We were not like the fairy tale, as hard as he’d tried to make it so.

WASTE NO TIME IF THIS METHOD FAILS

He is the cutest at the franzy house.

He can hold his breath for three minutes.

He lies on his stomach when he pictures the fish-stick girl, so his roommate can’t hear.

He likes to watch salt dry in bronchial patterns.

He dislikes improv comedy.

He laughs when the mailman falls on the ice.

He cries when a penny is removed from his nose.

He is thirty-one years old.

He knows who the president is, but not why.

He wrapped his arms around the choking man like he loved him.

He loves his peppermint socks, on which the fish-stick girl has complimented him.

He hates his reindeer socks, on which another human once vomited.

He draws a boy with a nose-shaped stomach.

He steers clear of medical students arguing the death drive in the cafeteria.

He is no longer allowed to operate his car.

He knows his roommate hates the president, and why.

He hears the improv troupe member say, If
they
don’t laugh, nobody will.

He loves the fish-stick girl.

He does not love the fish sticks.

He smiles when she says, Nice socks, sailor.

He refused to let go until he could hear the choking man’s lungs making breath.

He wets his eye with a wet napkin.

He is not stupid.

He is not a genius either.

He is not a bad driver either.

He is aware, yes, of why he is here.

He is here to be judged on the merits of his footwear.

He is aware that it would behoove him to take more seriously the seriousness of his situation.

He won’t look the doctor in the eye, because the doctor has radiator eyes.

He looks him in the ear. Counts the lobe dents and hairs.

He may not be a genius, but he knows when fish meat has decayed.

He likes to pronounce
decayed
like
decade.

He was for ten years frustrated, that old Odysseus!

He keeps
The Odyssey
on his nightstand so his roommate will fear him.

He draws the nose-bellied boy so his occupational-therapy counselor will fear him.

He diagnoses himself with milquetoastophobia: the fear of not making others afraid.

He asks to speak with the cafeteria supervisor.

He holds out half a grapefruit with a knife standing in it. This
pamplemousse
, he says, is older than my car.

He flinches when the supervisor takes a banana from the
steel bowl and draws his arm back, as if to fling.

He watches the improv troupers mince across the cafeteria like milquey meat until he
really
feels like killing himself.

He does not agree with the doctor that sketch comedy is a sassy little art form.

He hates to ask the doctor when he can go home and hear, You are in no way capable of meeting the demands of independent living.

He notices that
Hippocratic
is not too far from
hypocrite
.

He asks, What did the skull say to the electric-shock machine?

He answers, Thank you for not smoking.

He watches the doctor not be amused.

He thinks the doctor could use some swimming with dolphins.

He was for ten years minus one year a waiter of tables.

He does not wait any longer because of the lack of amusement people such as his doctor and the police feel about the saving of the choking man.

He thinks of the saving as angelic intervention when according to New York State law it was—

He
knows
angels aren’t real, fuckwad!

He is sorry for saying that word.

He is sorry for letting saliva fly into the doctor’s face.

He is not allowed, thanks to that word, into the TV room for two days.

He misses watching the human-misery shows.

He misses the other humans he watches the misery with.

He misses the restaurant where he waited until the day of the choking man.

He loves how the fish-stick girl has one curl that won’t stay down.

He once wore socks with rifles on them, but she made no comment.

He misses her in the dark.

He feels for her in the dark.

He kicked in the groin the fuckwad who said that thing about her caboose.

He hates the word
caboose
.

He likes the word
groin
.

He was an English major at a good-in-many-people’s-opinion college.

He cannot believe his doctor thinks the president of this country is doing a good job.

He wants a different doctor.

He read
The Odyssey
in college, so fuck you.

He will not get a different doctor.

He will not get in trouble for groin-kicking the fuckwad, because he bought his silence for ten dollars.

He recalls that the choking man was eating a ten-dollar plate of flesh.

He finds it stupid that news channels have been outlawed. Other types of misery are permissible—a man arrested for public dancing, a child born with turnips for hands, a contest called America’s Most Resourceful Homeless Person—but war footage, says the doctor, loosens the patients’ hinges.

He agrees with his roommate that hiding the bodies is an act of criminal obfuscation and that the doctor, like his Führer, would look good in handcuffs.

He likes how each color of candy in the TV room lives in its own dish.

He announces to the fish-stick girl, Human lung is a buttery meat.

He laughs when she blushes.

He adds, Whereas the heart tastes like pennies and the brains like raw lamb.

He diagnoses himself with sucrosintegrationophobia: the fear of candies mixing.

He hates when no red ones are left on account of the other humans hogged them.

He saw the choking poster every day at the restaurant, with its diagrams, instructions, beseechments.
Waste no time if this method fails.

He thinks Penelope had eyes the color of go. Just like the fish-stick girl.

He is not so different, really, from Odysseus: both are sailors hunting for home.

I like the word
method
.

I dislike the word
buttery
.

I give the patients their three squares.

I have my favorites: the pigeon man, the periscope woman, the guy who intends to assassinate the president. And, of course,
him
.

I can’t hold my breath for long.

I am thirty-one years old.

I have a big caboose that is admired by some.

I have one curl that won’t stay down.

I diagnose myself with strapmouthophobia: the fear of not having much to say.

I tell him, Those are the best socks I’ve seen on you yet.

I watch him smile, and smile too. (There is something contagious.)

I can’t stop talking about his footwear.

I blush when my supervisor says, No fraternizing with the lost minds.

I ask, Any new jokes today?

I lift a dollop of crushed potato above his tray.

I blush when he says, Your eyes are so green I forget all my jokes.

I mislaunch the potato, which blops onto the tray-runner and drips to the floor.

I laugh because he laughs.

I shiver through the rest of my shift.

I go home and run it like a tape:
Your eyes your eyes your eyes
.

I don’t think his mind has been lost.

I suspect that when he yells at my supervisor, Stop feeding us cattle that died from the blackleg! he is making a veiled reference.

I don’t think it’s a person’s fault if other people don’t get his references.

I look skeptical when he claims he can hold his breath for three minutes. But secretly I believe him.

He tells the fish-stick girl, In ancient Rome, soldiers were paid in salt. Hence our word
salary
.

He wishes he could laugh when she says, Well
mine
is only a few grains! but it really wasn’t funny.

He pretends to choke, gallantly diverting attention from her humor.

He coughs up one of the pennies he keeps at the back of his mouth and throws it (but not hard) at the supervisor and says, Get your money out of my lunch!

He misses how at the restaurant they’d fold slices of dog shit into the orders of rude customers, then happily watch the chewing mouths.

He leans up against the glass cough guard and whispers, Angels aren’t real—I know that.

He is crying a little. (Though not in a crazy way.) I
know
you know! says the fish-stick girl.

He wonders what the mailman ever brings to the franzy house, other than socks and letters that notify:
Your life goes on without you.

He has agreed to drive the getaway car for his roommate, provided they’re both back on the surface while this president is still in office.

He squeezes his eyes when the medical student asks him how he likes it here.

He says, Where—in this cage? and the medical student says, So the hospital feels like a cage to you?

He says, It isn’t a simile. Points at the window: barred. The other window: barred.

He senses the medical student’s disappointment, so he throws him a little bone of crazy. Hearts of oak, he cries, did you go down alive into the homes of death?

He is impatient with the fish-stick girl.

He tried to tell her this morning how this place is its own magic mountain, where the hero arrives for a three-week vacation believing he is healthy and ends up staying seven years—but she didn’t get it. She
pretended
to (smiles and nods) yet he saw the rockets in a line, unfired, wicks wet through.

The hero feels more at home, he added, in an Alpine sanatorium for lung complaints among the sick and nearly dead than in the so-called normal world! but she blinked in a way that reminded him of ocean arachnids who live so many fathoms down their eyes have no reason to grow.

He can’t develop his theory with her, nor with the other humans in the TV room; and his roommate, though intelligent and reasonable, has little time for theories. Wants only to discuss methods of execution.

He draws the nose-bellied boy on a napkin during their nonoptional monthly dose of improv.

He waves it above his head.

He shouts at the troupers, Here comes one scurvy type leading another! God pairs them off together, every time. Swineherd, where are you taking your new pig, that stinking beggar there, licker of pots?

He won’t stop until a nurse escorts him out of the cafeteria.

He wonders how the doctor can possibly think dinosaur-loose-in-supermarket or quiz-show-for-amnesiacs will lift a single spirit. If anything, these gags crush spirits like so many scuppernongs.

He likes how each grape of the arbor lives on its own tendril, and each tendril lives in its own follicle, and the fish-stick girl has a follicle that builds a wayward curl.

He rubs at night his own nipples, his own damp penis. His thumbs are her thumbs.

He hopes his roommate can’t hear.

His breath is like a little train.

He thinks the lung must get its golden flavor from the shiny lies humans are perpetually inhaling.

He was only obeying the poster!

He thought the method was failing, so he wasted no time.

He was only saving a life.

He can’t believe the doctor when he says the choking man wasn’t choking.

He knows the doctor lies because the president, loved by the doctor, lies.

He diagnoses himself with dupophobia: the fear of being lied to by people stupider than you.

He saw the choking man clawing his throat. Universal sign for!

He dropped his plates and ran.

He hugged the man like a bear lover.

He made a fist under his heart.

He did not stop when the man said stop.

He did not stop when the man’s girlfriend said stop.

He did not stop when another waiter said, Stop it, fuckwad! and tried to wrench him off.

He could not stop until the life was saved.

I miss him the week he spends in the infirmary. (Pennies tore his bottom on their way out, according to the nurse’s aide I paid ten dollars.)

I miss him a lot.

I have things to tell him, such as in ancient Greece there were temples where sick people slept in order to dream their own cures.

I have worked for three years at the franzy house, but the last three months have been the best by a landslide.

I was waiting for him.

I’m stupid, though, because how can you wait for a person you didn’t know was coming?

I’m not stupid, but my mouth is strapped.

I read last night in a poem:
They did not meet, so they could never be parted.

I want to lend him the book the poem’s in.

I am suspicious of the new server on my shift—an eyelash batter.

I hate people who say, Does my ass look ginormous in these pants? when they have asses the size of tennis balls.

I picture taking a pan of boiling water to her lashes.

I tell her, Why don’t you take your fifteen? when he comes through the double doors, walking a little stiff. (What kind of socks today?)

I am so glad to see him.

I crane over the cough guard: sting rays.

I’ve never read
The Odyssey
but say, Oh totally! when he asks.

I’m sorry.

I stare helpfully at the next person in line but he says, What for? and I say, Nothing! and he insists, No, really, why are you sorry? and I say, Oh, just—I gave you the broken piece of pie.

I smile when he says, That’s all right, I’m watching my figure.

I tell him that on my drive to work I pass a church whose sign says,
EXPOSURE TO SON MAY PREVENT BURNING.

I ignore the next person in line.

I want him to answer wittily—take a jab at religious hypocrisy, or make up his own and better pun. But he says, Whales’ backs don’t burn when they breach because a vitreous oil secreted by their epithelium deflects ultraviolet rays.

I worry that institutional living is infecting him. With non sequiturs.