The Natural Order of Things (3 page)

Frank quickly changes direction, resigned to the fact that in this world, violence and charity, like life and death, come in equal measures.

Later that night, when he arrives at the Zanzibar Towers and Gardens, he is surprised to find dozens of costumed figures crowding around the keg in Will’s apartment—a cardinal in flowing red robes, a drunken priest, a pregnant nun, a cheerleader, a soldier in green battle fatigues. It’s Halloween, he has forgotten, and without a costume he feels self-conscious. He backs toward the door, but someone like Frank cannot enter a room unnoticed, and before he can make a quick exit, the host emerges from a haze of aromatic smoke and grabs his arm. Outside the classroom, Will is a different person altogether. His face is still bruised, his lip swollen, but instead of a black blazer and a striped tie, he is wearing baggy jeans and a T-shirt with a grinning skull.

“I’m a memento mori,” says Will. “What the hell are
you
supposed to be?”

“Uh, I didn’t realize it was a costume party.”

“I’m only
teasing
you, Slick. You don’t need a costume. You’re the Minotaur, remember? You’re the bloodthirsty beast that feeds on Athenian youths.” He pushes a pint of beer into Frank’s hand. “Drink up, my friend, for tomorrow we die.”

Suddenly eager to catch a buzz, Frank drains the beer in one long swig, an astounding feat that leaves everyone breathless.

“Hey, Baby Meat, come check this out.” Will leads him through a narrow hall and over to a closet where the stalk of a plant creeps toward bright sodium lights.

“I can buy weed on the street, of course, but there’s nothing like homegrown.” He hands Frank a joint the size of a small cigar and expertly flicks a match with his thumb. “Here, have a little taste of the creature. That’s high-grade stuff, Slick. Harvested only an hour ago. I could probably sell it at school for a hundred dollars a quarter ounce, only I don’t grow enough of it. Or maybe I do and I’m smoking too much of it myself.”

Frank takes a powerful drag, holds his breath for what seems an eternity, and then lets the thick rings of smoke wobble toward the whirling ceiling fan. The stuff tastes vaguely like fertilizer, smells like horseshit, makes the world instantly dreamy and mellow. Tomorrow’s big game gradually fades from memory, and Frank follows the freaky permutations of his mind, the thread of each thought becoming tangled in the next until his brain turns into a big unruly ball of yarn.

“Fuck my old man,” says Will, rubbing his bruised face, “and fuck your old man, too, right?”

Frank, who is not quite sure what Will means by this, nods his head and smiles. Beaming with all the lechery and charm of a politician, he drifts into the front room and shakes hands with his classmates, gives high fives, tells a few dirty jokes. “I’m spinning yarn!” he shouts. Everyone laughs. Of course they do. These people would laugh at anything their quarterback has to say, and Frank, eager to impress his adoring fans, decides to perform his legendary animal routine. He stomps his feet, snorts like a bull, careens in cyclonic fury from one corner of the apartment to the next, looking for something to smash. With the exception of a few folding chairs and the slimy aquarium percolating with green water, there is nothing here worthy of destruction. Drooling, panting, turning red with exasperation, Frank crashes against a table, knocking over a dozen cups of draft beer. He hammers his fists against the doors and bangs his head against the walls. Chunks of plaster cascade down the front of his shirt.

The pious invocation soon begins: “We’re number one! We’re number one!” But Frank only hears a distant buzzing and feels a familiar Friday night blackness gathering between his ears like a furious cloud of bugs. He’s had enough, knows he’s had enough, but he drinks another beer anyway, and with the fragile bulb in his brain dimming to the lowest possible wattage he peels off his shirt and waits for the girls to descend. Some try to mother him; they call him “dear” and “sweetie” and tell him to sit down before he falls down, but these girls he rudely shoves aside in favor of the more flirtatious ones, the tall, lively, slender-framed girls who kiss his neck and nibble on his ears, but when he begins to grapple with them and says he wants to “take it to the bedroom,” they try desperately to push him away and threaten to scream.

Will swiftly intervenes. “Whoa, Baby Meat! Hold on. I have a little surprise for you. This way, this way.” Like some scheming carnival owner leading a another fool into
a dark tent to see the freakish thing he keeps in a dirty glass jar, Will cracks open a door to reveal a woman waiting in bed with only a thin white sheet concealing her naked body.

“This is Tamar,” he says. “Lady looks like a goddamn prize fighter, doesn’t she, Slick?”

Though he is nearly blind from drink and barely able to register an impure thought, a venial sin, Frank somehow manages to let out an instinctive snarl of desire. At last he has found a kindred spirit. Like him, Tamar is a kind of gladiator and has the bruises to prove it, an angry scar just below her naval from an incision that hasn’t healed properly, a missing tooth, a nose that is just a little crooked. She smells, too, like smoke and chemicals and sweat and a thousand other nameless things, each with a story to tell, and after tonight there will be yet another tale to add to her collection.

“I’m so glad you like her,” says Will, “because for the next thirty minutes she’s all yours.”

In the living room the death metal band begins to warm up. The lead singer growls into the microphone while the drummer, the one with the dreadlocks and the lazy left eye, hits the double bass drum with extraordinary speed, a lunatic march written for a marauding army of cannibal corpses, but Frank hears only Tamar’s flat and distant voice, a voice that speaks from the bottom of a deep well: “Come to bed, you bad boy …”

She lowers the sheet and gets on her hands and knees. Frank doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s gonna fuck this bitch, yes, fuck her all night long. An all-night vigil.

The following morning brings misery.

A storm has blown in off the lake, and freezing rain pelts the windows like small stones hurled by the tiny hands of angels. Paralyzed by pain and shivering in the drafty bedroom, Frank wonders if he suffered a concussion when he slammed his head into the wall last night. Each fold of his neo-cortex is a fault line, and each tiny shift of his head brings on tremors and quakes. His moans and the deep, tympanic rumbling in his chest record the seismic activity. A dozen pints of flat beer slosh around his bloated belly. Somehow he must make the harrowing journey to the bathroom, though it seems a hundred miles away. Naked, hunched over, ape-like, he shuffles up to the toilet, but when he opens the lid he finds the bowl already clogged with clumps of tissue and strange, floating islands of feces. He gasps, gags, chokes. Suddenly the dam breaks. He drops to his knees, and a great bilious river bursts from his lips, burning his esophagus and coating his tongue.

“That’s right,” he whispers. “Best to get it all out.”

After wiping his mouth on a towel draped over the shower curtain rod, he returns to the bedroom and collects his clothes. The woman is gone, has been gone for many hours now, but he barely recalls spending the night with her. Cringing with dread and embarrassment at the things he may have done, he gets dressed and then heads to the front door.

All over the apartment bodies are curled up on the floor like vulnerable fetuses. Will sits on a folding chair near the big bay window, sipping a beer and watching a movie. In his hand he holds a letter typed on pink paper.

“Good morning, Sunshine!” says Will. “Care for a little hair of the dog?”

The Minotaur is afraid to shake his head. His skull is cracking right down the middle like a prehistoric egg about to hatch a ravenous, flesh-eating beast. He tries to keep perfectly still, staring at the letter in Will’s hand.

“Another eviction notice!” Will says and tosses the letter to the ground. “So how’d it go last night?”

The Minotaur thinks about this for a moment, bites his lower lip. Forming words becomes a struggle.

“Everything went real good,” he rasps. “Helluva party.”

“Well, I’m awfully glad I could be of service.” Will grins. “With Tamar you don’t have to worry about catching the clap. It’s the
plague
you have to worry about. Ha!”

The Minotaur blinks in dumb incomprehension.

“Hey, Slick, you
do
know what day it is, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know …”

“It’s the first of November. The Day of the Dead. A day to build altars and shrines honoring the souls of the dearly departed, a day to drink and laugh and join hands in the Danse Macabre. Because no matter one’s station in life, the dance of death unites us all. Yes, we all dance to the same tune.”

Frank thanks Will for his hospitality and then stumbles out the door and down the stairs. On his way home he stops to rest against a tree and unleashes another pumping welter of vomit into an open sewer.

Luckily no one is awake at his house, and he creeps undetected to his bed. For a few hours he manages to sleep, but peace and tranquility elude him. All afternoon he is besieged by terrible visions, cold classrooms crowded with wizened men in black robes who tie him to a chair and jab him with hot pokers. They wheel out the infamous Brazen Bull, a medieval device used by inquisitors to slow-roast heretics. Its creaking hinges sound like the screams of its previous tenants: “Frank! Frank, you’re late! Kickoff is in forty-five minutes! Coach Kaliher just called. He’s frantic. He’s out of his mind. We thought you left the house hours ago.”

Through crusty eyes, he sees his mother and father hovering over him. They tremble with worry and seem to be on the verge of tears. He rolls out of bed, loses his balance, almost falls to the floor. The aftertaste of beer and puke and marijuana has him running to the bathroom.

“Frank, what’s going on here? What the hell
happened
to you? Is something wrong? Are you sick? Who did this to you? Who is responsible? Tell us. You have to tell us. The priests will want answers. The coach. The newspapers. For godsakes, Frank, you must protect us. You must give us a story!”

Through the rain-soaked streets of the city, Frank sprints toward the fiendish, yellow lights of the football stadium. Even from a distance he can hear the crowd pounding, drumming, whistling. The inexhaustible clangor of ten thousand irrational minds. The roar of famished lions waiting to tear the flesh from his bones. For a split second he actually believes he is being led to his death. When he enters the locker room, he finds that his teammates have already made their way onto the field for calisthenics and warm-up drills. Pacing back and forth in front of the showers, visibly sweating
through his shirt, massaging his writhen face with powerful fingers, Coach Kaliher turns on him and shouts, “You irresponsible sonofabitch! Get your goddamn ass out there before I shit down your throat!” Frank blinks, not because he is unaccustomed to such rage but because the voice rips into his brain, another rusty railroad spike pounded into his right frontal lobe.

The game begins. During the first half, Frank throws for only thirty yards and leads the offense past midfield only once. Watching helplessly from the sidelines, Coach Kaliher jumps up and down and waves his arms; he spits and sputters and shouts blasphemies. His assistants keep a safe distance. At halftime he grabs Frank by the jersey and slams him hard against the lockers. Again and again he does this.

“My job is on the line, you asshole!
More
than just my job!”

During the second half, Frank can barely breathe. He forgets the count, confuses the plays, stumbles, trips, runs into his own linemen. He hears the constant crack of shoulder pads, the peals of thunder from an advancing infantry, the maniacal screams of zealous fans. While stranded under a writhing heap of stinking bodies, he feels a hand clamp onto his balls and tighten like a vice. An injury time-out is called. For five minutes he squirms on the field, suspecting one of his own teammates. His fans actually boo him, their hero, their savior. When the final whistle blows, the team is routed 28-3. The season is lost. At the other end of the field, beneath the goalposts, the opposing quarterback drops to one knee and gives thanks to the Lord Jesus for blessing him with this miraculous victory.

His knees battered, his back aching, Frank trudges into the tunnel. Someone shouts his name, and he looks up just in time to see a dark figure dump a cup of scalding coffee on his head. He clutches his face and collides into the cinderblock wall. Edmund Campion, the school’s photojournalist, is there to snap a picture to commemorate his suffering. A portrait for the ages. In the locker room, Frank limps to the nearest toilet stall and dry heaves. Hot tears coarse down his cheeks and drip one by one into the bowl. He marvels at the simple beauty of the rippling water.

Stunned by yet another humiliating defeat, his teammates shower, get dressed, and leave the stadium without speaking to him. Coach Kaliher doesn’t make an appearance at all.

Alone and trembling with pain, Frank collapses on a bench. The silence is kind to him. He closes his eyes and sees his teachers, the principal, the wealthy philanthropists like Will’s father, and somewhere far away, he hears a voice—soft, kind, gentle, just Christ-like enough to lend irony to this diabolical display of commerce. Or is it Pilate’s voice that he hears? It’s difficult for him to distinguish between the two: “Parking fees, concessions, seat licenses, television revenues, book deals, increased enrollment …”

Secretly, Frank is glad he has done this terrible thing, glad he has brought this machine to a grinding halt, but he also knows that he will never get away with it. There are consequences in this life and in the next, or so he has been told, and when he leaves the stadium, he expects to find an angry mob waiting under the luciferian light, but no one is there, not even his parents, and as he walks home through the labyrinth of streets and listens to the brittle leaves scattering along the pavement, he can sense a dark presence.