Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

I just sat next to Beth for the next fifteen minutes or so, until I realized that she was far, far away, that she would hate me, that if I were truthful, if I really told her who I was, if she really knew me, she’d hale me forever. I leaned next to her, and I could tell she was disgusted, I could feel her shrinking away from my closeness. Why the hell did she go out with me in the first place? What’s wrong with her, I thought. “I’m going to the bathroom,” I whispered. I got up, and then I walked out of the movie theater and onto Twenty-third Street. It’s strange to do that, you know. You’re used to leaving the movies with a huge crowd of people. But it was just me, all alone, walking out. I walked a few blocks as if on automatic pilot to a public phone I remembered on the corner of Twenty-sixth and Seventh, don’t ask me why, but I thought of bowling, and I popped my quarter in.

“Hello?”

“Jamie, it’s me,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Watching TV. What happened to your date?”

“What date?”

“Oh.”

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“No, “ Jamie said.

“Will you meet me?”

I had this picture in my head. I wanted to go bowling. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, they have this bowling center. You’d never know it was there, but there it is. And you just can’t go bowling alone. Who could go bowling alone? So that’s why I called Jamie. I wanted to forget Beth by bowling my sorrows away. Why did I do that? What made me make that choice? Why bowling? And why Jamie? I mean, I hold no malice in my heart. Do I?

(click)

The truth is, women are objects. I mean, the feminists can say what they want, but when it comes right down to it, girls are made of bone and muscle and blood. They have eyes and chins and cheekbones and lips, arms and breasts, hair... You’re behind the camera over there looking at them, you’re creating a moment, an object in space, you’re saying, “Smile, look this way, smooth your hair, that’s it, perfect .”

They’re saying, “How do you want me? Here? Like this?”

( click)

We were standing in the flickering lights of the pinball machines at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. There was the smell of urine and antiseptic, cigarettes and cleaning supplies. Jamie had said she wanted to play the Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball game with multiple levels. I wanted to bowl and was still trying to convince her. “I don’t know how to bowl,” she kept saying. Her eyes were everywhere but on me. “And,” she almost whispered, “I don’t want to wear someone else’s shoes.” She pressed the button for one player.

“You agreed to bowl,” I said. “You met me here on the pretense of bowling.” We’d been out socially before, but never in such degenerate surroundings. It amused me to see her here.

I slouched against the blinking machine and watched Jamie inexpertly paddle the silver ball into the starships of the Klingon Empire. The game was over quickly. Jamie’s shoulders slumped downward as she turned toward me, defeated, with something to say, I could tell, her eyes moving everywhere. “Is this... helping you?” she said finally. As usual, she was sucking on a piece of her hair. It was all pointy and wet, like she was going to thread it through the hole of a needle. I wondered when was the last time she washed it.

“What do you mean,” I said, “the pinball?”

“I mean with that girl, with Beth. Is this helping you, you know... with your... forgetting thing?”

(click)

Angie. Forgotten with a pint of Deep Chocolate.

(click)

Darlene. I forgot her by watching the Gulf War on CNN.

( click)

Vanessa. I forgot how I forgot her.

( click)

Jamie had never mentioned that she knew about this before about forgetting. I said, “Um.” That is exactly what I said in response, “Um,” and a nod. It was all I could think of. I must admit I was freaked out. I felt like someone had just lifted the trunk and found me there, where the spare tire and gas can should be.

“Because I don’t mind,” Jamie said, and now she looked directly at me. “I mean, I like helping you, helping you do whatever, whatever it is, you know what I mean?”

(click)

Have you ever been taken over by an alien?

( click)

Sometimes I remember things about my sister Nicole for no discernible reason. These pictures are just there in my head. For instance, Nicole used to have this pillowcase. You know, some kids have blankets or teddy bears, things that comfort them. For her it was this pillowcase. All ratty and filled with holes, it had a floral motif, but it was designed, I think, by the same people who did the graphics for Laugh-In. The flowers were all loopy and cartoony, like they’d exploded across it. Nicole used to get inside that pillowcase and curl up, completely covered, she was so little.

Let me show you something else. I just have to turn on the Super Eight projector. Do you know how hard it is to find these things nowadays? This footage of Nicole I found last time I was home. My uncle Arnie shot it when he was a teenager. Okay, here it is. See? That’s the back yard at my grandmother’s. There’s the pool she drowned in. That’s me in the water. I used to like to sit in the shallow end with my nose just above the water’s surface like that. I wouldn’t move, just let the water go all still and quiet. In the sun, the surface of the water would become reflective, and I’d get lost in the blue and the gold. It was beautiful. I guess I was always visual, a born photographer. Under the water I’d let my body relax and sort of float. I’d cross my legs. It was its own kind of meditation, I suppose. I remember the sounds too. The water lapping at my ears very gently, very slowly. That echoing sound under water. The light glinting blue and gold, white and gold, white and blue.

“Hey,” I asked Jamie, “do you want to get drunk?” The truth was, I didn’t want to play pinball. But it suddenly occurred to me, there in the middle of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, surrounded by all the alcoholics and junkies, prostitutes and petty thieves, that I would much, much rather get smashed, completely and totally blotto, than play pinball or bowl or anything else. It had been, after all, the original idea. I was picturing Beth, her cute shoulders in the flickering movie-light. I kept seeing her hand resting there in the dark of her lap, that creamy skin. That fucking bitch.

Jamie started, “I don’t really—”

“Oh, come on, Jamie,” I cut her off, “a couple of belts won’t hurt you.”

She hesitated, then she said, all resignedly, “All right.”

I gave her a smile. Nervously, she smiled back, her teeth pointy and green. “This way,” I said. I led her over to the Port Authority Bowling Center Snack Bar and ordered a couple of beers. When they came, I toasted Jamie, downed my whole cup, and asked the derelict behind the counter for another round. He served them in big waxy-paper cups, and it was cold, straight from the tap, deliciously numbing. “A couple more of these,” I said, “and then I know a fabulous place on Tenth.”

Jamie belched. And throughout the evening, amazingly, she kept up beer for beer. After a while, it became shot for shot. It was pretty funny seeing her drink that way. Big, fat girl there knocking them back with me — little skinny guy at some terrible bar in New York’s most depraved part of town. There was something about the drinking and that, you know, that it was Jamie, my assistant, that made me relax, let me rest it a bit. I did forget Beth. And not just in the usual way I forget a girl, like I said, not just that I made myself not care anymore. I honestly and truly wasn’t thinking about Beth at all. I was looking at Jamie and I was seeing into her squinty eyes and her puffy cheeks, and it came to me in the midst of this drunken stupor that nothing mattered anymore, she knew, I could tell her anything, that I could offer my body to her, eyes closed, palms out, I could explain. I told her about Nicole. We slid into the wooden bench of a booth in the back of that seedy place, and I relayed the story of how I sat in the pool watching the light and how my grandmother pulled Nicole out of the water, her body limp and blue. It came out of me like a wound gushing. Jamie opened up too, telling me her life story, that there was this guy in her high school, she was so incredibly in love with him, but he was gay, blah blah blah. And it’s like, it’s like something amazing happened. It’s like I was watching. I mean, I was doing it, I was there, with Jamie, in the bar, on the hard wooden bench with all the names scratched onto it, but I was also very far away. My true self was up around the ceiling, far up, just watching. And I could see myself sitting there. And I could see huge Jamie, and she was just a tiny, little, infinitesimal speck.