Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans

I lay in Min’s bed and tried really hard not to think about Marc, about his soft kisses and how his arm felt around my shoulders and the way he breathed when we made love and the way he hopped around when he was happy and the stuff he said about my eyes and my hips and the small of my back, and what the hell can an ashram offer that I can’t? I mean besides silence and solitude and spiritual revitalization. I tried to float again. I could hear Thebes and her friend rehearsing When I Go Mad, a horror play about an insane mother that they were planning to put on for the neighbour kids. They used British accents. Thebes was the insane mother. Here’s a snippet.

Thebes: Good night, dahling, I’m off to the bar. Friend: New, new, Mutha, please sing to me first. Thebes: Oooookay, I shall siiiiing to you, yeeees, of course, but while I sing you must close your eyes.

Then there’s the murder attempt and the screaming part, which they were having a really hard time getting through without laughing. They were already on take thirty-five or something.

I got up and knocked on Thebes’s door. There were Groovy Girls stickers all over the door and goofy photos of her and her friends.

Bonjourno! Thebes said. C’mon in. Take five, Abbey, she said to her friend. Thebes was wearing this glittery silver sash that she had ripped off a fake Christmas present when they were in Mexico one year, and her friend was wearing one of Thebes’s old Winnie-the-Pooh nightgowns over her jeans. They were flushed and out of breath from all that psychotic killing and bar-hopping.

When does Logan usually get home? I asked her.

Eleven is his curfew during the week, but he ignores it, she said. She was reapplying her lipstick, using a CD as a mirror. Abbey was curled up in the fetal position on the bed. Archie comics were everywhere, walls of them, and a big hardcover called A Criminal History of Mankind propped the window open.

When he gets home, we’re gonna talk about this whole deal, I said.

Thebes was warming to the idea of looking for Cherkis. She thought he was a poet but she didn’t know exactly. She remembered seeing him when she was three or four, after her operation when the piece of scalpel broke off in her brain.

I went into Logan’s room for a look around. There were books and CDs all over the floor and band posters covering the walls. I stared back at the naked guy in the Pixies poster giving the thumbs-down to the world. On the wall by his bed Logan had written a poem or a mission statement or a prayer or something in very tiny letters that slanted down, down, and farther down, until one line obliterated the next.

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

You’re not stylish or cool

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

Be nicer to people

THAT NIGHT LOGAN CAME HOME DRUNK. I heard him fall down in the kitchen. I went in and switched on the light and he said, Oh man, dude, that is a seriously diaphanous nightgown you’ve got on. I switched the light off again and knelt down beside his head. C’mon, let’s get you up to bed. He wanted to stay there.

What’s that smell? he asked.

Cascade, I said. C’mon, let’s go. He pawed at the box of Cascade and spilled it all over the floor and himself.

Shit, he said. Thebes came downstairs rubbing her eyes, still covered in candy necklace crap, and asked us what was up.

We’re at the beach, said Logan. Check out the sand. He moved his fingers around in the Cascade crystals.

Logan’s hammered, I said. Help me get him up to bed. She grabbed one of his feet and began to drag him across the kitchen floor and down the hall.

Okay, okay, don’t, don’t, he said. I’ll walk. He rambled on about renaming the thumb. We should totally rename the thumb, just the three of us, tonight!

What do you want to call it? asked Thebes.

Renée! said Logan. No, Shenée! Yeah…

We helped him up the stairs and pushed him onto his bed. He fell face down, and I punched the pillow next to his head so he’d have an air hole. Thebes took off his shoes and a condom fell out of one of them.

Yeah, right, she said.

Does he have a girlfriend? I asked her.

Deborah Solomon, she said.

Logan moaned. I love her! he said.

She’s a writer with The New York Times, said Thebes.

Logan’s arm slipped off the bed and he picked up a Public Enemy CD that was lying on the floor and held it to his face.

He thinks that’s Deborah Solomon, whispered Thebes.

Logan was out. Thebes hustled off to her bedroom, took a running jump from the doorway and landed on her bed. Righteous air, I said. Sweet dreams.

I went downstairs and cleaned up the Cascade and then headed back up to make sure Logan was still breathing and hadn’t choked on his own vomit. He was fine, snoring softly, hadn’t moved at all. But I could hear Thebes crying. I went into her room and sat down beside her on the bed. Hey, I said. She was hiding her face behind a book. What’s up, buttercup? I asked. She couldn’t talk. I gently pulled the book away from her face so I could have a look at her. I smiled. She was a mess. I put her book down on the floor and held her and sang a few lame songs and told her Min was going to pull through, she always does, she’s strong. She’s so strong.

Thebes told me she’d stuck her arm in a machine at Pharma Plus and found out that her blood pressure is high but not dangerously high.

High’s the new normal around here, I think, I told her. I rocked her like a baby. I sang every lullaby I knew, and some old Talking Heads and even some George Clinton. She told me I’d lost her place in her Quidditch Through the Ages book but it was okay. Eventually she fell asleep in my arms.

That night I had a dream that Min had showered, and the kids and I had thrown a party. Hundreds of people showed up, people from around the world. Logan was in charge of the music and Thebes poured the champagne. Even Cherkis showed up, but he stayed in the yard and the kids scampered in and out of the house bringing him stuff and exchanging furtive messages.

Thebes was all business in the morning, running around the house getting her school stuff together, talking non-stop. Every so often she’d inhale sharply like she really needed an infusion of air right then to get her through her next story. It reminded me of Min and how she used to demonstrate her hyperventilating technique. Her goal had been to pass out in our tree house and then “accidentally” fall out of the tree to her death.

Thebes was still wearing her blue terry cloth outfit, but she’d washed her face and combed her hair a bit, on the sides, in the front. I was still stretched out in her little bed going, Mmmm-hmmmm, mmmm-hmmmm, really, yeah, wow, mmmm-hmmmmm, while she motored around the place getting ready.

You know what I hate? she said.

No, what.

When my teacher uses carpet as a verb, she said. She put on her teacher voice. We’re carpeting. After carpet I’ll help you work out your personal problems. When we carpet we keep our hands in our laps.

What’s carpeting? I asked.

We sit on a carpet and talk, said Thebes.

That sounds nice, I said.

Show me ten! said Thebes.

What? I asked.

My teacher says that all the time, she said. It means show me ten fingers, like show me your hands so I know you’re not fooling around with them during carpet. I told Thebes that the next time her teacher asks them to show her ten, she should say she’s only got two, and hold up her middle fingers.