Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Mirror, mirror on the wall.

She’d known she had it when she was about seven. By the time she got to high school it could ripple over her face like a dark wind.

Even now, strung-out exhausted, she had it. For half a beat she engaged the rare expression before it sparked away. It was something a good photographer had to sneak up on because she couldn’t duplicate it on cue. This was America-so the way you really knew you had it was if you could sell it.

She had logged some shoots and she had a portfolio. She’d been told that, if she put in the work, she could give New York a try. But she kept waking up in cheap rooms with a hangover and Earl in the bed next to her.

And then she met Hank.

Jolene turned from the mirror and studied the wreckage of her husband.

Once she’d thought the worst thing in the world could only happen directly, physically, to her. Now it had happened to someone else, and she was definitely feeling it. She’d cut her hair to honor the emotion.

“That’s a change. You taught me that,” she said under her breath.

As she reached over and eased the sweaty mop of hair away from Hank’s wild eyes she wrinkled her nose. She was getting used to the diaper smell. Dutifully, she changed him, and, as she wiped him clean, she noticed how the muscle tone was already turning to taffy. Her hard old Hank was spreading into a puddle of flesh.

She deposited the diaper in the diaper caddy and kneaded the residue of white talcum powder between her fingers. One of life’s safe things. For a moment, she almost remembered the fragrance from infancy, from before walking and talking. She pursed her lips. “Hank, you tough old fart, now that you’re not here anymore I think I’m starting to appreciate you.”

He’d grown up fascinated with the war-soaked fiction of Hemingway, James Jones, and Norman Mailer; so, like many wanna-be writers out of that tradition, he’d conducted a love affair with near-death. He’d hung it out there more than most and returned from the edge with a fair scrapbook .

Now he knew he’d just been a tourist.

There was only so much of him left. Left here at least. Portions of him were missing and sometimes he suspected they had moved on to somewhere else.

All he could manage now was the sensation that the inside and the outside were merging; that the things he thought were him were blending slowly with the things that weren’t. He had the distinct feeling that he’d been wearing his skin like a blindfold all his life.

Storms of human weather still took the form of shadows that brought food and nourishment. He vaguely knew the slosh was being inserted into his feeding tube. Inside, he felt his stomach ripple in anticipation and the drool beaded on his tongue but he couldn’t control his tongue, it just crawled around in his mouth, wagging at nothing.

. .

Sometimes there was more than nothing.

Glimpses.

Damaged snapshots from a burned family album. All alone in the dark theater of his head, he became a child again, waiting for the show to start.

I remember. .

And suddenly he was there with his first memory. .

Mom.

She was strongly made, a dark-haired farm girl with large hands, on a rubber pad on red linoleum, scrubbing, down on her knees with a can of Babbo and a pail at her side. She’d put out the front page of the Detroit News to keep Hank off the wet floor, and the grainy picture on the newsprint was gritty black and white and showed soldiers raising a flag above a scrub of brush.

She was first-generation American, with cousins fighting for Hitler and a husband in the Pacific killing Japs. He remembered the cool, sticky scent of lipstick, powdery cosmetics on soft leather, and the smell of Chesterfields in her purse. The war was everywhere. Like fat, black victory germs, the endless factory smoke sprinkled down on the snowbanks.

At play in the summer backyard, among tomato plants that grew up in humid green waves down in the hot tickling dirt, under the leaves, in the emerald-filtered light, he dug holes for his toy soldiers. Tiny khaki vinyl men. Dappled shadows.

Like the island jungles on the other side of the world where his dad. .

First song. An old scratchy 78 .

“Feudin’, Fussin’, and a Fighting” by Dorothy Shay.

The song played on the night his dad came home from the Pacific. Dad was hugs and tumbling on the floor, a smell of tobacco, alcohol, and sweat. Whiskers.

Two years later they were both gone, instantly, in a head-on crash. Mom’s sister raised him after that. Holy Roller Church four times a week to keep him out of trouble.

Sister Wolf at the young people’s meeting on Friday night would work her pimply congregation with guilt and shame, and then close the sale with cold-war terror. The bombers, she would say, have left Russia and are coming to drop their atom bombs. You better give your soul to Jesus tonight. And during the altar call he learned to go forward in the second wave, so the preachers were busy laying hands on the first rush and he’d slink on his knees right through the thrashing of the Holy Ghost and creep out the back door of the basement auditorium and sneak a cigarette in the alley.

First bike. Schwinn. Red. With fat, treaded tires pebbles got stuck in and clicked on the sidewalk.

First woman. Halloween night, 1960, his freshman year at Wayne State in Detroit. She was older, a high-breasted Canadian graduate student down from Toronto for a party, impressed enough with his persistence to take on his sexual education. Set the bar real high for all the slow American girls to follow.

. .

The first man he killed. .

. .

But then he heard the words . .

“So here’s the thing,” Jolene thought out loud as she ran the suction wand over Hank’s gums and around his tongue. “Whatever I did before, I haven’t done any of it since I’ve been sober.

“Remember what you said about drunks being lucky because they can reinvent themselves? How they can lump all the bad stuff they did together and flush it down the past. What I’m shooting for here is to see you through this thing to make my amends. The problem is goddamn Earl doesn’t seem to get it.”

She fluffed the pillows behind his neck. “Earl doesn’t think people can change. For sure not me. He’s sort of the original antipersonal growth hormone in that regard.” She fingered his chin and touched his cheek. “And you. I think you’re due for a shave.”

She left and returned with a plastic razor, shaving cream, a bowl of hot water, and a towel. As her hand glided the razor over the familiar contours of Hank’s face, her eyes wandered the room, remembering how they’d worked together, Sheetrocking and taping the walls, building the bookcases, both of them in T-shirts and jeans spotted with paint, eating ham and cheese on rye, drinking Cokes.

They both tried to quit smoking the first time in this room, after they’d fooled around on the floor amid piles of books.

All those books. Had he really read them?

Could she someday? Before she met Hank the most she’d read at one sitting was People magazine.

“We had a pretty good time for a while,” she said, carefully wiping the lather from his face and neck. She clicked her teeth and hunched her shoulders. The house surrounded her like an expensive train wreck.

Her train wreck, goddammit.

She patted Hank on the cheek and walked over to the books Earl had tipped to the floor. She stooped, collected them, and methodically put them back on the shelves. That was Earl for you. He threw tantrums. He could be a violent child.