Jess Walter - The Financial Lives Of the Poets

And then, there’s sleep deprivation as torture, of course. It’s one of the oldest tortures there is-relatively clean, no scars-a big hit at Gitmo. There’s an old account by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was sleep deprived by KGB officers in the 1970s. He described “a haze” from which his “spirit” was “wearied to death.”

That about describes it: haze. Spirit wearied. Death.

I put my head down on the desk for a just a second to think and-

The front door opens downstairs.

I sit up. It’s dark outside. Shit, what time is it?

I hear the front door close.

Where am I? Push back from the desk.

She’s climbing the steps.

My face feels rubbery. Can’t focus.

She pauses at the office door.

She’s silhouetted: “I got your message.”

“What?” I wipe the spit from my mouth.

Voice quavering: “In the front yard?”

Groggy, I have no idea what she means. What time is it?

Her eyes are strange-unfamiliar. “For what it’s worth-”

“Do you…know what time it is?”

Her eyes shut. “When did you become cruel?”

I meant it as a question, not recrimination.

“And they’re coming to take that wood away?”

Oh, right. The wood. “Tomorrow. Look Lisa, I-”

She walks away. Our bedroom door eases shut.

Then the day comes flooding back to me…righteous Randy and nasty Reese…tree-fort wood…CI OH-2. Oh, and I have a watch! A dark, unactivated watch on my wrist! So I know the

time…quarter to six. No wonder I’m disoriented; I think I’ve actually gotten an hour of sleep. I shake my head to clear the static and then walk to our closed bedroom door. I put my hand against the cool wood. So here we are. Now what?

I can’t hear anything in there. But behind that door is our bed. (So tired…) If I could just somehow get to the other side of this door, climb into that bed, and we wouldn’t have to speak, wouldn’t even have to face each other…I put my hand on the cold knob. I swear, we wouldn’t have to say a word, she could just settle in behind me, her knees nestled behind mine, and we could sleep until-

“Dad?” I turn. Franklin is wearing his art hat-a paint-splattered Angels cap that he wears whenever he breaks into his craft caddy.

“Hey pal.”

“I need to ask you something.”

“Sure.” I follow him into his bedroom. Here we go. What’s happening to you, Dad? Are you and Mom getting a divorce? Which parent will we live with?

In his fussy, cluttered bedroom, Franklin has his easel set up in the center, a big piece of butcher paper clipped to it. He’s done a crude painting of Godzilla (Franklin is working through a monsters motif in his art right now, this, a classic interpretation-scales down the back and on the tail, three claws on each heavy foot, fire coming from the gaping jaws.) On top of the painting he’s written, “To Elijah. I Am Sorry.” And on the bottom, “From Franklin.”

“I like this. It’s a nice gesture.”

But something is bothering Franklin and he looks at me with all the seriousness his earnest little face can muster.

“What is it, sport?”

“I just need to know…” He takes a deep breath. “Well…”

He sighs; he’s just going to go ahead and ask his question: “Who would win in a fight? Godzilla or a tyrannosaurus?”

Christ, I’m a mess-groggy, blubbery, slobbery, easy-to-tears. Crying at the stupidest things: Jenga, Godzilla. I blink away wet salt again. I didn’t see weepiness in the list of sleep-deprivation symptoms. Hard to say what gets me this time-the sheer eight-year-old perfection of that question…or that he asked me …or maybe the fact that his little conscience has led him to paint an apology for his antagonist, his Prince Chuck. He stares at me, waiting.

God, they want so little, these shits; they don’t care about money, big houses, private schools, darkness and light. All they want is answers. And sugared cereal.

“Well.” I wipe at my eyes. “Godzilla would win. You know. Because of the fire.”

“The lasers,” he corrects. “Yeah.” He stares hard at the painting, sighs. “That’s what I said. But Elijah said that Godzilla is made up, so Tyrannosaurus would win.”

“Well, that’s just a lack of imagination,” I say. “Some people are literalists. We can’t hold it against them. Not their fault, champ.”

Franklin nods in agreement. “What’s for dinner?”

I glance back across the hall, at our closed door. “I’m thinking pizza.”

Franklin’s eyes follow mine to our closed bedroom door and he nods.

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we’re eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled

from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.

And the mushrooms are fresh.

I send Teddy upstairs to see if Lisa wants to join us for this tiny miracle. I tell him to let her know that I got fresh peppers and mushrooms on our half, her favorite. She declines. She tells Teddy she doesn’t feel well.

“What’s she doing up there?” I ask, as nonchalantly as I can muster.

Teddy shrugs. “She’s in bed. She’s sick.” He doesn’t meet my eyes.

Dad stares into the winter-black back window as he chews.

“You like the pizza, Dad? Or do you prefer the other place?”

He stares down at the pizza as if he was unaware that it was pizza.

“Pradeep Duncan got Guitar Hero for his Wii,” Teddy pretends to tell Franklin. Here it comes-Teddy’s regularly scheduled, ten-year-old consumer confidence report, his pointed survey of all the expensive and inappropriate gadgets, games and movies that other fourth graders are routinely being given by their cooler and more loving parents. He gives this quarterly report only to his brother so that Lisa and I can’t launch into any kind of lecture about his age, or the fact that we can’t afford such things, or how, even if we could afford them, it wouldn’t matter to us what other kids have.

“And his stepdad lets him watch the Saw movies,” Teddy continues.

“No way! ” says Franklin. Then he shakes his head. “I wouldn’t want to watch those.”

“Dude, I would,” Teddy says. I wonder: where did Teddy learn such indirect communication? And… Dude? I picture him outside the 7/11-

Above us, the floorboards creak. My eyes go to the ceiling. Up there, the bathroom door opens and closes. After a minute…a flush. The bathroom door opens. She pads across the floor. The bedroom door opens and closes again.

My phone buzzes. I glance down at it. Jamie. Another board teeters.

I excuse myself from the table and take it in the living room.

“Hey,” Jamie says, and there’s a thumping bass behind him, and I hear someone yell, Fuck you, Larry, and then there’s a burst of laughter, and Jamie says, “Slippers, we’re having a rager over at Larry’s, yo! You should totally come over, man.”

Rub my brow.

Jamie goes on: “We gotta go to Weedland and get our shit tonight anyway, right?”

Jamie has piggybacked a smaller buy on top of mine. Okay, so here we go. I glance at the black watch on my wrist. I suppose there’s a certain point where there’s nothing more to fear. Once you’re not just a drug dealer but a narc, too…what the hell have you got to worry about? That is the one good thing about the bottom: at least it’s the bottom. “Yeah.”