Want Not (11 page)

She hadn’t been with a man in four, five years, she realized; enough years, in fact, that most of the men had been more properly called boys. (Lola never understood the way Micah’s affections could toggle back and forth between genders; she’d claimed Micah was self-delusional, owing to the backwoods way she was raised, or else just plain greedy. That was another of her issues.) Those encounters, however, had almost always been swift and mechanical, their narratives circumscribed by custom if not biology; unlike with women, there was rarely time to linger, to explore, to pass an hour doodling random fingertip patterns on another’s skin, or mapping the riverine trails of postcoital sweat. Always there was that lurching, insistent erection. With selfish male lovers, it ended there, at the guttural, sleep-inducing finish. With the selfless ones, however, the lingering and exploring was always directed at her, on her; they couldn’t bear reciprocation. She’d never noticed, for instance, the embossed line of flesh that ran down the underside of the penis and divided the testes, so straight it seemed surgically crafted. Or the accordion pleats of the slumbering penis, or the nimbus of frizzy hair on the testicles that, neither silky nor coarse, reminded her of the soft, pliable, ultrafine thorns on the canes of a certain wild berry she used to graze upon during her childhood summers. Cupping his fever-warm testicles in her right hand, she drizzled his groin with water from the sponge in her other hand, then swabbed his lolling penis, shifting it tenderly from side to side as one adjusts a sleeping infant. When she felt a delicate pulsing, at its base, accompanied by a quick, brittle-sounding inhalation from up above, she stopped, wagging her head as if to revive herself from a dream. Stroking his hair again, she whispered, “It’s okay, lie still.”

After shedding all but her panties, she nestled herself beside him on the narrow mattress, pulling a maroon flannel sheet over them both. Passing in and out of sleep, she shushed him, whenever he’d start to murmur again, pressing a finger to his lips. Micah had no idea who he was, or what he would say or do when the technicolor fog cleared from his brain, when he climbed back out of the hole they claimed he was in, but she trusted the narcotic peace she was feeling with her body coiling his—the contact high from his flesh pressing against hers. Something more than a samaritan impulse had drawn her to him, she felt certain—like her father, who she guessed was at that very moment reading scripture aloud to himself in the grainy darkness of his cabin, Micah believed in invisibilities. She didn’t share her father’s faith but had faith just the same.

Only Lola, commandeering the other bed an indeterminate number of hours later, broke the spell. “Jesus,” she muttered, looming above them. “When I said he needed a womb, I didn’t mean it literally.”

But Micah didn’t care—was surprised, in fact, at just how little she cared—pretending to be asleep while Lola grunted and sighed herself to sleep a yard or so away, and then truly sleeping, beautifully hard, despite the music and screams and howls from outside, until just before dawn. Talmadge was spooning her when she awakened, his face buried between her neck and shoulder; she could feel his jaw unfolding into what felt like a smile when she moved. Silently, and with animal ease, she took his hand in hers. Four days later, they were in Austin together, and eight months after that, New York City.

Which was where she found herself now, on Thanksgiving, chopping tofu into squishy little squares then limp carrots into rounds, while eavesdropping on Talmadge explaining the intricacies of squatting to Matty. “Water is key,” he was saying. “Just like in nature. You’ve got to have a water source. The Christian anarchist dudes took care of hacking that. Can’t even tell you how stoked we were to turn the faucet on and see all that nasty rusty water coming out. That was like, everything.” Micah smiled, remembering Talmadge’s head-cocked befuddlement when she shrieked—
shrieked,
jumping pogo-stick style in the kitchen, then nearly tackling him with an ecstatic embrace—when water came spurting from the tap in diarrheal squirts. “What else is it supposed to do?” he’d asked, nearly as giddy as Micah but uncertain why. (Their Austin squat had been communal, shared by six other people, with all the infrastructure hurdles having been cleared years before.)

She remembered, too, as she fired a match to light a homemade penny stove, his infinite, boyish fascination with the stoves—this whole life, she sometimes felt, was an epic ceaseless adventure for him. A British backpacker in India had taught her how to make the stove: With a knife or scissors, you sliced up three Heineken cans (“has to be Heineken,” he’d instructed; something about the can shape) to make a base, burner, fuel cup, and simmer ring. The burner, about three-fourths of an inch tall and made from a can bottom, got its edges crimped and its sides and bottom punched with holes, including a quarter-inch hole in its convex center. Once assembled, you placed a penny over the quarter-inch hole, which somehow (this was what Talmadge could never figure out) sealed the burner and stabilized the heat; after sliding the stove under a tripodal pot support (for one stove, Micah used irrigation stakes; for another, bent bicycle spokes), you filled the fuel cup with alcohol and lit it. (HEET, a cheap, methanol-based gas-line antifreeze, was their preferred fuel; according to Talmadge’s calculations, they averaged eighteen meals per twelve-ounce bottle, which went for two dollars at an auto-parts store at Cooper Square: eleven cents per meal.) Micah had two of their four penny stoves going now: On one, simmering gently, was a pot filled with lentils, wild rice, garlic, onions, basil, and cashews, and onto the other she placed a pot containing the carrot rounds, olive oil, and vegetable stock.

From a shelf above her she pulled down a cast-iron Dutch oven; after checking it for roaches, she blew the dust off the bottom and set it on the counter. Nearby was a beige disk of dough she’d made from whole-wheat flour, salt, soy milk, and olive oil. The olive oil wasn’t right but it was the only oil they had right now. This was for the pumpkin pie Talmadge had requested. “We gotta have
something
traditional,” he’d said. She dropped the dough into the Dutch oven and patted the center down to form a basin at the bottom. Arching her body sideways to read the recipe Talmadge had found on the internet and reproduced in his barely legible shorthand, she combined, in a mixing bowl, the chopped tofu with the contents of a dented can of organic pumpkin purée that Talmadge had scored, last week, from the Whole Foods dumpster. He’d rushed into the apartment that night like a man clutching a winning lottery ticket. But this was foreign to her: She’d never made anything like a pie before, and the vagaries of scrounging food from the trash rendered recipes more or less useless. You got what you got, and you did the best you could with it. Having never measured anything before, unclear in fact as to the difference between a teaspoon and tablespoon, she guessed at the amounts of ginger and cloves and cinnamon and allspice and sugar that she dashed into the mixture. After mashing everything together into a thick orange gloppiness, she dumped the mixture into the crust, fitted the heavy lid, and set the Dutch oven on a third stove. She lit it, and rejoined the boys in the main room.

“Pie’s on,” she said.

“Sweet,” Talmadge moaned.

“You’re making a pie?” Matty said. “Damn. This is better than Grandma’s.”

Talmadge said, “I was just kinda explaining the Tampon Tower.”

“Yeah,” said Micah, crinkling her nose. “Not my favorite nickname . . .”

“One thing I should kinda probably warn you about,” said Talmadge to Matty. “There’s bed bugs pretty bad. They snuck in on a mattress we found.” He yanked down his shirt collar to reveal a small galaxy of red bites. “They don’t seem to affect Micah so maybe you’ll luck out.”

Matty’s horror was blatant. “Maybe,” he said, “I can get some . . . kind of spray?”

“That’s cool, whatever,” Talmadge said.

Matty raised the whiskey bottle to his lips; his spooked expression suggested the desire for fortitude rather than flavor. Some of his mother’s insect phobia—she’d once thrown out everything in the kitchen cupboards, even the canned goods, after discovering a single dead weevil in a box of Cream of Wheat—had wormed its way into his own subcortex, and he couldn’t stand bugs. In his ideal world, the world’s citizenry would band together to conduct a mass slaughter of any creature in possession of more than four legs and/or unfeathered wings. He understood this was ecologically vile but longed for it anyway. As he’d often said, to his parents and his defense lawyer and the very few girls (three) with whom he’d hooked up for longer than a month, he was only human.

Talmadge watched a brown bubble form inside the bottle, then skitter upward through the liquid as Matty raised the bottle, as if it were fleeing Matty’s lips. Big gulp, he noted.

“Matty ripped that off a dead lady,” he announced suddenly.

Matty blew a mist of bourbon. “Dude!” he said, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

“Micah’s cool.”

“What dead lady?” said Micah.

“Damn, man. That was my
gift.
”

“It’s funny,” said Talmadge, though he wasn’t sure it was.

Rolling his eyes, and punctuating his speech with theatrical sighs, Matty explained, “Some old lady died on my bus. Somewhere in Bumfuck, Missouri. No one wanted to sit next to her so I was kind enough to volunteer.”

“Then he klepto’d her bourbon,” said Talmadge.

“I was doing her a favor! Like . . . like if you’d died in our dorm room, okay? It woulda been only polite to pry the bong from your hands.”

“Oh, I get it,” said Talmadge, grinning. “It was just good manners.”

“Hell yeah. What if, like, the driver radioed ahead and the old lady’s
daughter
was there to get her off the bus?”

“Was she?”

“Naw, I’m saying
what if.
How’s that gonna look? Her dead mom on the bus hugging on a sack of whiskey. No girl needs to see that.”

“She was
hugging
it? You, like, pried it out of her hands?”

“No, figure of speech. It was next to her, up against the window.”

“So you were just, what, tidying up the scene?”

“Right! See, man, I let her die with dignity—with
pride.
It’s all good. No one got hurt and everyone’s happy. Well, I mean, not
happy
. . .”

“Her daughter’s not happy,” said Talmadge.

“But she coulda been
more
not happy, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Unless she likes whiskey.”

“Why you jacking with me?”

“I don’t see an issue,” said Micah.

“
Thank
you,” said Matty.

“Unless, you know, the whiskey was poisoned,” she said, “and that’s what killed her.” Repartee like this was rare for Micah, and Talmadge’s heart surged: God he loved her. The girl could
hang.
Even with Matty Boone, who for a few troubled moments appeared to be seriously considering the possibility of poisoned bourbon.

“Dude,” Talmadge whispered to him. “You’re so dead.”

“Who would poison an old lady?” Matty said.

Talmadge replied, “Her daughter.”

Busting into a loud, fat laugh, Matty exclaimed, “I made the daughter up!” He held the bottle out to Talmadge. “Here, man,” he said. “Drink up. Blood brothers against the wind. We go down together . . .”

“Here’s to you, Maybelle,” Talmadge said, swinging the bottle toward the painting, and Micah winced as it went vertical. Whiskey had been her father’s preferred medicine, in his case moonshine, and she dreaded the bosky smell of it on Talmadge’s skin tonight. She didn’t mind the weed, to which Talmadge had mostly limited himself since his self-described “come-to-Jesus” moment at Burning Man. The rest of it, though . . . she worried.

“Ah, death . . .” said Matty, reclaiming the bottle from Talmadge; the word hung there, awkwardly, as if Matty was quoting something he couldn’t remember the rest of. Shrugging, he fetched a box of cigarettes from the side table and drew one out of the package. Micah’s eyes were drawn downward to where he’d ground two previous cigarettes into the floorboards. A sliver moon of ash already skirted his chair.

“Here,” she said, sliding a ceramic plate from beneath one of the fat candles, for him to use as an ashtray. The plate, which was trimmed with gold paint and petaled like a flower, had come from the trash of a nursing home on Henry Street, and there’d been something poignant about it, she remembered, as with the teddy bears she often came upon, or the wedding dress she’d once unearthed. With some discarded objects you could almost feel the history embedded in their cell structure, the heat of their absorbed sentiment, as if you might be able to hold them to your ear to hear their stories told, the way a seashell confides its memories of the sea.

“Whoa, check this out,” Matty said, skimming the plate’s inscription. Acidly, he read it aloud: “‘God bless our home . . . Bless this home, dear Lord above, with Happiness, and with thy Love.’”

Embarrassed, Talmadge said, “You find what you find out there. If it ain’t broke, what the hell . . .”

“I like it,” said Micah.

“You find what you find, right,” Matty said, setting aside the plate while knocking a gray spiral of ash to the floor. To them both, he said, “On the real, though, I’m still trying to, like, uh, digest all this. What’s the point again? I mean, like, eating from the trash . . .”

As if physically dodging the question, Talmadge leaned quickly back in his chair so that Micah could field it.

“It’s about . . . well, a lot of things,” she began. Exhaling deeply, she smoothed the wrinkles of her dress on her thighs. Something about the smoothing evoked the nineteenth century: a pioneer woman fixing to explain salvation to a savage. “I mean, the trash, yeah. Okay. Foraging is about refusing, on a totally personal level, to join in the overconsumption that’s just, just sucking the life from the planet. It’s about shunning commodity culture, or disposable culture, whatever, it’s different words for the same thing. The amount of waste this society generates, it’s enough to feed and clothe and sustain entire other countries. And I’m just talking, like, reclaimable waste now.
Multiple
countries. So it’s not only possible but doable to survive off that waste stream. I mean, check out the pumpkin pie cooking in the kitchen . . . Exhibit A.”