Orientation (4 page)

He was surrounded by empty tortilla-chip bags, the partial remains of yesterday’s dinner—the last time he ate. Hunger cut into his guts like a razor. He sat with his head thrown back, panting through his open mouth, waiting for another breeze. His thoughts drifted to a memory of the last time he used a bathtub as a bathtub instead of as a toilet. He thought about the last shower he ever took, and the needle-spray of water on his skin. He thought about other things he missed. Driving, with the window down. Sex. Friends. His feet. His dick. He thought about the last beach he ever saw—the smell of the ocean, its tug and surge around his calves, and the suck of wet sand under his heels. He loved the beach. He thought about his dick again. He had neither seen nor been able to touch his penis in over ten years, and he missed that.

A breeze came. He heaved the caftan roll aloft, against his face. It was a good breeze, a sudden gusty one that sent empty chip bags fluttering and was cool against his damp skin. His skin was always damp. He never stopped sweating. He lifted one tit, then the other, then let the caftan drop about him. He halfheartedly reached for an empty tortilla-chip bag, sighed, and looked from the TV screen to the clock in the kitchenette, then back to the TV. The inside of his head beat like a heart. He would have to call the church people.

He turned to look out the window. From where he sat, he could see the tops of the trees of a downtown plaza that he used to walk to and sit in, years ago. He could see the skeleton of a skyscraper that was going up. He could see the sun reflecting from an apartment tower in the distance, its light flaring in the westerly windows, then winking out as the sun moved on.

He threw the remote at the TV. A blizzard of white erupted on the screen. He reached frantically for empty tortilla-chip bags. He ripped two bags flat, licked them clean, and tossed them aside. He rocked to get at more bags. The room groaned and creaked. The love seat lurched to the left and slipped off its four-by-sixes, and he fell. Pots and plates in the kitchenette clattered. The windows shuddered in their casements when he hit the floor. He was stranded on his back. Another bag was within reach. He tore it open and licked off the oil and salt. He tossed it aside, made fists of his hands, and hit himself in the face five times.

There was activity in the apartment below, movement in the corridor outside, pounding on the door. He lay still. He did not answer. The footsteps retreated. They would be calling 911.

He sighed, wiped the blood from his face. He looked up at the window. From the floor he could see no buildings at all, only a rectangle of sky. It was cloudless and intensely blue, and he stared up into it for a long while. Emergency personnel were soon crawling over him, cutting his caftan off, lifting and pushing at his naked body, rocking it into position over their slings. It is always the same engine company that comes to his rescue, the firefighters all chatty and familiar. “How you doing, Hector?” He ignores them. He keeps his rectangle of sky in view. He sees a man on a beach ambling barefoot along the surf’s edge. When the TV people arrive, with their spotlights and their boom mikes, the man on the beach breaks into a trot, angling up toward hard-packed sand. And then he turns, jogs backward for a moment, and waves goodbye—an insolent waggle of his fingers—to the people lurching through the surf behind him. He turns again without breaking stride, and he runs. He laughs. The firemen lift on three. A reporter asks why he’s laughing. He doesn’t hear the question. There is only the wind whistling in his ears and the sting of grit on his face and the ocean’s salt taste inside his mouth. He runs, fleet and swift, the balls of his feet barely disturbing the sand and leaving no trail for anyone to follow.

III.

They were on a blind date, arranged by a friend she worked with whose husband knew him. They had been chatting in the wine bar, waiting for a table at a popular Italian café that did not take reservations. They had been waiting over an hour, but neither of them seemed to mind, and their patience was rewarded with an intimate table, tucked into an alcove whose windows looked out on a lovely lantern-lit garden. There were long waits between menus and ordering, between salads and entrées, but they both seemed to relish the leisurely pace, which allowed the conversation to carom pleasantly from subject to subject. This was her favorite part of a date, its first few hours, when the pretense of best behavior held sway and the blemishes of individual personality had yet to appear. So things were going well. But after they ordered dessert, the subject of movies came up.

She told him about an old western she had just seen. The previous week she had been laid up with a stomach flu, unable to move or eat for days, and she watched TV the whole time. The hero was a cavalry officer, and throughout the movie he had been shooting Indians out of their saddles without batting an eye. But when he had to kill his lame horse, the hero—one of those archetypal western stoics—became hesitant and dewy-eyed.

“His name was Ol’ Blue,” she said. “Or Ol’ Buck. The horse, I mean. And damn if I didn’t start crying. It’s nothing to watch people in a movie die, but when the horse gets it, I’m all weepy. Isn’t that awful?”

“Not so awful,” her date said. “The Indians were the bad guys. You were supposed to not care. That’s how they made movies back then.”

She nodded. “It still bothers me, though. People can die by the dozen, but it only gets to me when a horse or a dog is caught in the cross fire. You know what I mean?”

“I do.” He leaned toward her. “I
do
know what you mean. But you see, dogs are innocent. People deserve to get it. The bad ones, anyway.”

“I know,” she said. The flame of a candle flickered on the table between them. She watched the light play on his face. “Sometimes I worry that I’m hardened to it. Watching human beings die while munching on popcorn.”

“I don’t think that would be possible with you,” he said. “To be hardened, I mean.”

She twirled her wineglass, looked into it, and smiled. A comfy silence arose. Dinnerware clattered quietly around them. A siren in the distance rose and fell, rose and fell.

“But then,” he said, “that would depend on the human being, wouldn’t it?”

She asked him what he meant. Before answering, he reached for the wine bottle, topped off her glass, and refilled his own. He leaned back in his chair.

“Let’s say you’re in a room,” he said. “In one corner there’s a dog, and in the other corner a man. A man who has killed without remorse.” He sipped from his glass. She waited, her mouth slightly open.

“You have a gun,” he said. “Which one do you kill? The dog? Or the man?”

She thought a moment. “That would depend on the dog,” she said. “If it was one of those yippy little lapdogs? I’d plug the pooch!” She laughed.

Her blind date smiled. He carefully set his wineglass on the table. “Seriously, though. Which one would you shoot?”

She sipped from her glass, held it close. “Well, then. I wouldn’t shoot either one. I would … abstain. That’s it! I would abstain.”

“But you
have
to shoot one.” He leaned forward. “That’s the scenario. You have the gun. One of them has to die.”

“I see,” she said.
Here we go,
she thought.
The fork in the road. The diverging path.
She looked out the alcove window. Moths pitched madly at the lanterns outside.

“In that case,” she said, “if we have an animal and a human being, I would have to shoot the animal. That’s the only choice, really.” She turned to him. “Isn’t it?”

He was still smiling, but blinking rapidly. “This man is a killer. He’ll kill again. He has
vowed
to kill again.” He leveled a finger at her. “You have to stop him from killing again.”

She shook her head. “I know, but I can’t point a gun at a human being and shoot him. I just can’t do it.” She brightened. “Say, we’re both in this scenario, aren’t we? Why don’t I hand the gun to you?” She batted her eyes. “You’d kill him for me, wouldn’t you?”

His smile widened for one second and settled into a thin line.

“All right,” he said, shifting in his chair. “What’s your favorite breed of dog?”

She hesitated. She had no favorite breed. She didn’t like dogs, and she was about to tell him this when he snapped his fingers.

“Favorite breed,” he said. “Come on, come on.”

She selected a breed at random.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He cleared a spot on the table. Near the wine bottle, a yellow Lab pup mewled adorably, gnawing on a bedroom slipper. Slouched against the candlestick, a man watched indifferently. He was, of course, a child killer, slack-jawed and cruel, with cracked lips and stains on his pants and evil in his black, greasy heart. He was the Last Child Killer. Shoot him, and all children would be safe, but let him live and he would somehow breed and multiply. Shoot the dog, and beloved Labs everywhere would vanish, never to return. Her blind date elaborated on the dire hypothetical consequences, his hands slicing the air and disturbing the candle flame. A fat moth thudded against the window glass next to his head. She watched the moth, the guttering flame, the sheen of flop sweat on her blind date’s forehead.

And then dessert arrived.

It was the house specialty. They called it Cuore Inverno—a ball of hazelnut gelato inside a dark chocolate shell, drizzled with syrup of pomegranate and positioned within an immense cut-glass goblet dolloped with crème fraîche and dotted with champagne grapes. This was why she had suggested meeting at this café. She picked up her spoon and leaned forward. The man across from her had fallen silent. “Of course, it’s just a game,” he was saying now. “No biggie.”

“Right,” she said, gazing into the goblet before her. She gave the ball a sharp whack with the flat of her spoon. Ice cream oozed sweetly from the wound, and she pried into it.

“It’s just interesting,” he was saying. “What people would do, I mean.”

She put the spoon into her mouth, sucked on it, and swallowed. She closed her eyes and groaned: “Oh. My. God.” They had figured out a way to keep the gelato cold and soft while encasing it in hard chocolate. She’d been hungry all week, coming off the stomach flu. She had starved herself all day, looking forward to this evening, and it was worth it.

The man across from her touched his spoon on the table, then left it alone. “Well,” he said. He looked around the café, then back at her. “This was nice,” he said. “Wasn’t it?” She didn’t answer. He watched his blind date work intently on the dessert, watched her finish it, chattering all the while about their dinner together, speaking of it in the past tense, as if this evening had already entered their common memory, as if it had become the story they would tell their friends—the story that he imagined they would both look back upon and laugh about, years from now.

IV.

She was buried on a sun-dappled slope of lawn at the edge of the cemetery grounds, near a thin stand of cypress trees. There were five men present: her husband, her grown son, the mortician from the funeral home, the limousine driver, and a Catholic priest recommended by the cemetery people. They all wore dark suits and ties, even the priest, for some reason. And they all had on sunglasses that glinted in the midafternoon sun. They could have been mistaken for Secret Service agents discreetly burying one of their own. The cemetery bordered a county golf course, and a boisterous round could be heard in progress just over a tall hedge. When the priest closed his book and blessed the deceased’s eternal soul, the limousine driver stepped forward and flipped a switch that engaged a pulley. As the casket descended into the ground, father and son made their silent farewells, and hereafter would recall this moment of departure and loss with such ambient details as the smell of mown grass, the twitter of a bird or two, the irregular screak of a pulley motor, and the hoots and high fives of golfers in triumph.

In the backseat of the limousine, father and son loosened their ties. They gazed out the windows, watching the cemetery grounds roll away and the terrain of strip malls and auto dealerships along the highway unreel past them. As their neighborhood glided into view, the father turned away from the window, pressed his fist between his knees, and let out a small sigh. It was a tiny, restrained exhalation, a brief leak of air that nonetheless seemed to deflate him completely and leave him shrunken inside his suit. The mortician, watching in the side-view mirror, casually wiped the corner of his eye. And even the veteran limousine driver—a mortuary science student in his third summer with the funeral home—even he got weepy and had to stop chewing his gum to blink back a tear.

They pulled up in front of a small yellow house with a gabled roof and a single dormer window that faced the street. The stucco was chipped and patched, but the shrubs and lawn were neatly trimmed. The mortician opened the passenger door, and as the father and son climbed out, he asked them to wait a moment. He went around to the trunk and hefted out a roundish, foil-wrapped package in an open cardboard box. The mortician was a beefy, red-faced man. He looked more like a plumber than a mortician. He stood cradling the box like an infant. Seeing as it was Thanksgiving tomorrow, he was saying, he hoped they would find use for a complimentary fifteen-pound cooked turkey, with his condolences and all the trimmings. He handed them the box, solemnly squeezed their shoulders, then climbed back into the limousine. The two of them watched the vehicle pull away from the curb, ease down the street, turn left without signaling, and disappear from view.

The father followed his son into the house, then into the kitchen. “Are you hungry, Pop?” the young man asked. He slid the heavy box onto the table in the breakfast nook and examined its contents.

“I could eat, I guess.”

In addition to the turkey, there were two cans of cranberry sauce, two cans of candied yams, a quart of mashed potatoes, a loaf of soft white bread, and a pint of gravy. The son peeled back several layers of foil from the turkey to reveal a patch of crisp browned flesh, which he probed with his finger. It was still warm.