Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

I stop.

“No, don’t,” she says. “Keep going.”

She’s not crying hard, but they are fat, lamenting tears.

“We can try again tomorrow,” I tell her.

“No, I’m okay,” she says. “Just keep going and do something for me, would you?”

“All right.”

“Put the headphones on me.”

“You mean, while we’re doing it?”

“Music on,” she says. From the headphones on her bedside table, Nirvana starts to hum.

“I know I’m doing it all wrong,” I say. “It’s been a long time, and…”

“It’s not you,” she says. “I just need my music. Just put them on me.”

“Why do you need Nirvana? What is it to you?”

She closes her eyes and shakes her head.

“What is it with this Kurt Cobain?” I say. “What’s your deal with him?”

I grab her wrists and pin them down, but she can’t feel it.

“Why do you have to have this music? What’s wrong with you?” I demand. “Just tell me what it is that’s wrong with you.”

—

The drone follows me to the garage, where it wanders the walls, looking for a way out. I turn on a computer and download one of these Nirvana albums. I play the whole thing, just sitting there in the dark. The guy, this Kurt Cobain, sings about being stupid and dumb and unwanted. In one song, he says that Jesus doesn’t want him for a sunbeam. In another song, he says he wants milk and laxatives along with cherry-flavored antacids. He has a song called “All Apologies,” but he never actually apologizes. He doesn’t even say what he did wrong.

The drone, having found no escape, comes to me and hovers silently. I must look pretty pathetic, because the drone takes my temperature.

I lift the remote for the garage door opener. “Is this what you want?” I ask. “If I let you go, are you going to come back?”

The drone silently hums, impassive atop its column of warm air.

I press the button. The drone waits until the garage door is all the way up. Then it snaps a photograph of me and zooms off into the Palo Alto night.

I stand and breathe the air, which is cool and smells of flowers. There’s enough moonlight to cast leaf patterns on the driveway. Down the street, I spot the glowing eyes of our cat. I call his name, but he doesn’t come. I gave him to a friend a couple blocks away, and for a few weeks the cat returned at night to visit me. Not anymore. This feeling of being in proximity to something that’s lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now. It’s a feeling Charlotte would understand if she’d just talk to the president. But he’s not the one she needs to speak to, I suddenly understand. I return to my computer bench and fire up a bank of screens. I stare into their blue glow and get to work. It takes me hours, most of the night, before I’m done.

It’s almost dawn when I go to Charlotte. The room is dark, and I can only see her outline. “Bed incline,” I say, and she starts to rise. She wakes and stares at me but says nothing. Her face has that lack of expression that comes only after it’s been through every emotion.

I set the iProjector in her lap. She hates the thing but says nothing. She only tilts her head a little, like she’s sad for me. Then I turn it on.

Kurt Cobain appears before her, clad in a bathrobe and composed of soft blue light.

Charlotte inhales. “Oh my God,” she murmurs.

She looks at me. “Is it him?”

I nod.

She marvels at him. “What do I say?” she asks. “Can he talk?”

I don’t answer.

Kurt Cobain’s hair is in his face. Shifting her gaze, Charlotte tries to look into his eyes. While the president couldn’t quite find your eyes, Kurt is purposefully avoiding them.

“I can’t believe how young you are,” Charlotte tells him. “You’re just a boy.”

Kurt mumbles, “I’m old.”

“Are you really here?” she asks.

“Here we are now,” he sings. “Entertain us.”

His voice is rough and hard-lived. It’s some kind of proof of life to Charlotte.

Charlotte looks at me, filled with wonder. “I thought he was gone,” she says. “I can’t believe he’s really here.”

Kurt shrugs. “I only appreciate things when they’re gone,” he says.

Charlotte looks stricken. “I recognize that line,” she says to me. “That’s a line from his suicide note. How does he know that? Has he already written it, does he know what he’s going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. This isn’t my conversation to have. I back away toward the door, and just as I’m leaving, I hear her start to talk to him.

“Don’t do what you’re thinking about doing,” she pleads with him. “You don’t know how special you are, you don’t know how much you matter to me,” she says, carefully, like she’s talking to a child. “Please don’t take yourself from me. You can’t do that to me.”

She leans toward Kurt Cobain like she wants to throw her arms around him and hold him, like she’s forgotten that her arms don’t work and there’s no him to embrace.

Nonc pulls up outside Chuck E. Cheese’s and hits the hazards on his UPS van. The last working cell tower in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is not far away, so he stops here a couple times a day to check his messages. He turns to his son, who’s strapped into a bouncy chair rigged from cargo hooks, and attempts to snag his cell from the boy, a two-and-a-half-year-old named Geronimo.

“Eyeball,” Geronimo says into the phone. “Eyeball.”

It’s one of the boy’s few words, and Nonc has no idea what it means.

“Trade?” Nonc asks as he raises a sippy cup of chocolate milk. “For some gla-gla?”

Geronimo has puffy little-boy eyes, white nubby teeth and an unfortunate sunburn.

“Eyeball” is all the boy will say.

Nonc next waves his DIAD, the electronic pad customers use to sign for their packages. It’s got GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth capabilities, though most of that is worthless since the hurricane. The kid goes for it, and Nonc steps down into the parking lot, which is a checkerboard of green and blue tents.

The boarded-up Outback Steakhouse next door is swamped with FEMA campers, and a darkened AMC 16 is a Lollapalooza of urban camping. It’s crazy, but weeks after losing everything, people seem to have more stuff than ever — and it’s all the shit you’d want to get rid of: Teflon pans, old towels, coffee cans of silverware. How do you tell your thin bedsheets from your neighbor’s? Can you separate your yellowed, mismatched Tupperware from the world’s? And there are mountains of all-new crap. Outside the campers are bright purple laundry bins, molded plastic porch chairs and the deep black of Weber grills, which is what happens when Wal-Mart is your first responder.

Inside the pizza parlor, the place is packed, everyone looking sunburned and glassy-eyed in donated T-shirts and baggy-ass sweats. Nonc heads for the restroom, but when he opens the door, a loafy steam rolls out that makes it clear a hundred people have just taken a dump, and even Nonc — a guy who has lately improvised toilet paper from first-aid compresses, a miniature New Testament and the crust of Chuck E.’s own pizza — even he backs out.

Nonc steals all the plastic spoons and napkins, then checks his voicemail, trying not to focus on the people around him — they’re so clueless and pathetic, sitting around Chuck E. Cheese’s all day, a place that’s open only because it’s a Christian outfit. Sure, Nonc shouldn’t point fingers — he’s had some mosquito problems lately, and his wraparound sunglasses have given him a raccoon tan line. But nobody gave him free clothes and prepaid calling cards after he was evicted last year and all his possessions were auctioned by the sheriff.