Tim Horvath - Understories

She looks intrigued or skeptical. “What are some of your projects?”

“Well,” he says, “We’re sort of on the hunt for our next big thing. Not the next big thing,” he adds. He’s towing the Angus line here; his brother believes fervently that an ill-chosen pronoun could stymie them, set them back decades.

So as to not sound like he’s totally full of shit he starts to tell her about the trail surface — simulating treadmills with six pebble-and-root distribution settings. Sasha and Hanh have both hoisted themselves up on the countertop in the kitchenette that partitions the “grown-up” nook from the rest. Hanh is playing with the coffeemaker, which is one of those ones with the little bullet-train-to-landfill cups. He’s examining it like it like a toy whose features he hasn’t mastered yet, trying out every button. Meanwhile, Sasha scooches on her stomach.

“Make mine a dople espresso, please, Hanh,” says Pete.

She’s grinning as she scoops Hanh up, and then he is kicking and screaming again, while Sasha observes, hands on chin, all Bethany in her expression of cool fascination with the nutty things people will do that are counter to their own interests, although maybe Hanh actually has a winning strategy here, maybe wants out; maybe Hanh doesn’t want his mom talking to the strange guy, the funny funny guy that puts a smile on her frowny-face.

“I think we’re going,” she says, as collected as though she’s delivering some rare Bolivian creature right there on the premises.

It’s only after they’re gone and he’s left with Sasha that he realizes that to him she is only “Hanh’s mom.”

Post the usual wrestling match with the car seat, as they drive away, he says, “Do you know what Hanh’s mom does?” as if he’s known her for years.

“What?” asks Sasha.

“She studies the mushrooms.”

“Oh,” says Sasha. “Yucky.”

“In the rain forest,” he adds.

“Is it close by?”

“No,” he says. Then he corrects himself. “She did that before,” as if he knows the exact time line of her life. “In a past life. Before Hanh.”

“Before she came to the Runnedalot place?”

“Long before that.”

The last few times Pete and Sasha were here, the place was already Sir Playalot! (it’s supposed to be a play on Sir Lancelot or Camelot, or both, you see — the letters are shaped like little castle bricks, with flags jutting out of some of them and even, upon close examination, images of children in cute chain mail poking through between the turrets and — well, here his medieval architectural vocabulary gives out). The time before that, it was an adult-video store, and Pete was horny as all get-out. Veritably in heat. And his hankering at the time was most particular — he was seeking blow job footage (not foot job blowage). The blow job, the grail, the thing he didn’t get from Bethany, even though, as if to taunt him, she was an utterly oral person, always chewing or licking or even sucking on something that wasn’t him. Now, as he makes his way around the space, he can remember, vile though it is, exactly where each aisle was, the one that held interracial videos, the one that was devoted to amateurs and teens, the one for thirtysomethings, the aisles set aside for “gonzo,” whatever that was, and the fellatio section, right where now there is giant whale beanbag, like someone’s sick joke. It is as disgusting as though a child was murdered here, the bones interred beneath the ground, he thinks. But he also thinks about the irony of it all, a thought that passes through his head sometimes, which is that people are obsessed with the very thing that makes children but which is the very thing that they/we must keep from children, and isn’t this very funny, that we protect them from it more zealously than we’d protect them from seeing a shoot-out. Sometimes he thinks this is a really profound line of thinking and at other times he thinks this is tied with a bunch of other ones for the Most Mundane Thought that’s Ever Been Thought.

Pete has learned a few things while being, for all intents and purposes, unemployed for the past eight months. Such as that which makes something spam is in the eye of the spammed. He knows that emails promising obscene sums are ludicrous and fake, but after pawning his Rickenbacker and amp and some tools to pay his electric, and putting on practically all his garb at once when his heat got turned off in February, he finds himself deleting them less reflexively and aggressively. Their reek of desperation makes his own feel less dire. And while he is moderately well endowed, he can only imagine how those penis-enlargement pills announced by various other emails fall — like manna, missives from the divine — if one is literally in possession of a pin prick. Spam are like weeds, i.e. the name we bestow on whatever we deem a nuisance. Since Bethany vamoosed, he’s developed an appreciation for dandelions. They’ve got shitty PR, a lowly reputation, but that doesn’t make them any less vibrant than daylilies or orchids or anything else. A couple glasses of dandelion wine with the industry execs and you’d be singing their praises, rubbing yellow circles on one another’s chins.

It will turn around, he knows. People will want to buy highend copiers again. It’s not like he sells fax machines or anything. But in these times people are sticking it out with their lumbering old Xeroxauruses. He barely even gets to the second level of features in his spiel, doesn’t get to live-demo the faceup assembly, do his whole “Let’s grill us some content!” demo, watch their collective cringe when his greasy spatula meets the glass because they don’t know the grease is fake. Almost never does he make it to the Toner Challenge anymore.

Angus had always believed he was destined for bigger, and Pete still looked up to him, in spite of how the whole reality show thing had gone to shit. So Obsession Swap hadn’t been the breakthrough crossover sensation that the execs were hoping for. Did that make it any lesser a concept? It was awesome to watch the guy who collected military models go clubbing and see his sequin-enveloped counterpart bidding on a mounted Northrop T38-C Talon. The point was that Angus did stuff, shoved his foot in many a door. He pitched to the guys whose Hancocks came preprinted on checks. Could he pay Pete back? Did he owe child support? Nay and nay. But it was only a matter of time before his ship came in, sails billowing. Angus — and by extension Pete — was really counting on the thing with the energy drink to come through. Balls to the wall, Angus had marched straight into the corporate headquarters of his favorite energy drink — producing company. The bastards would probably get rich off him, but that was cool, because he’d sue and get his share that way if need be.

“You just gave them the idea?” Pete asked him.

“You sound like Dad ,” Angus fired back. “What do you take me for? Do you really think I just handed it to them complete with little fluttery bows?” He placed a digital recorder with its little dangling mic on the table and pressed PLAY. It was a little painful to listen to — there were awkward silences, and Angus’s suit pocket, where the recorder had been hidden, was loud, the fibers outspoken, drowning out some crucial parts. But the gist was clear.

ANGUS: Do you know what I find to be the biggest problem with energy drinks nowadays?

ENERGY DRINK EXEC: [uncomfortable laugh followed by hard-to-discern response]. . would that be?