Miranda July - The First Bad Man

He was asleep.

THE GREGORIAN CHANT WAS STILLplaying when she came home from work. I was waiting in the candlelit bedroom. She poked her head in, bewildered. I poured tequila into the tumbler I only had one of; it had been holding dusty barrettes for the last sixteen years.

“Weird lights,” she said, sipping and looking around. The CD was on a different track now, a silencing hymn. Mute, we climbed into bed.

I lay with her and she curled around me in the old way, Ss.

The whole chant played through and then a new one began, one lone voice in an infinite cathedral, climbing and echoing and praising. The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of this life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in particular, for the way it allowed him to cleave so tightly to the world. I squeezed her arms and she tightened them around me.

“You have to move out.”

She froze. I pictured the man cutting off his toe. I shut my eyes and sawed and sawed.

“You need to live in your first apartment, learn to take care of yourself, be free. Fall in love.”

“I am in love.”

“That’s nice. That you would say that.”

She didn’t repeat it.

Because she was behind me I didn’t know what was happening for a long time. Then she breathed in sharply, sucking her tearful snot back into her throat.

“I don’t know how I’ll”—she sniffled into my neck—“take care of him.”

I counted to nine.

“I could — if you wanted — keep him here. I mean just until you got settled.”

She cried now in a way I could feel, her whole body shaking.

“I guess I’m pretty much the worst mom ever,” she coughed.

“No, no, no. Not at all.”

The CD played on and on. Maybe it started over again from the beginning, it was hard to tell. We slept. I got up and gave Jack a bottle. I came back, slipped into her arms, slept and slept. Morning had gotten lost on the way home. We would lie this way forever, always saying goodbye, never parting.

Clee thought it would be less hassle if I became a legal guardian. “Because it might take me a while to get set up.”

“That makes sense,” I said, holding my breath. Now that it was decided, she made plans very quickly, with an unfamiliar momentum. I was informed of an appointment at the courthouse; she drove, chatting all the way. As it turns out, almost anyone can legally kidnap your child, just as long as you stand in front of the judge and tell her you’re “totally fine with it.” A social worker would check in on me four times in the next year and Clee would get her own place.

“We’re more than happy to help out with her rent,” Suzanne assured me. “Obviously we should have done this in the first place. All parents make mistakes. You’ll see. When are you coming back to work?” She thought she’d won — that we were competing for her daughter and she’d won in the end.

I told Clee she could stop pumping since we’d have to go to formula anyway, but she promised me a month’s supply of breast milk.

“And when I come visit on Fridays I can pump.”

“You’ll be dried up. It’s fine — he’s seven months old. You’re done.”

Tears seeped into her eyes. Tears of joy. I hadn’t realized she hated pumping so much.

WE DIDN’T SAY THE LASTnight was the last night but the next day was the day she would move into her apartment in Studio City and it followed that she would sleep there that night and the night after and for years until she moved, probably into a bigger place, maybe with someone, someone she’d marry, maybe they’d have kids. Eventually she’d be my age and Jack would be in college and this time, this very brief time when we lived together, would just become a bit of family lore about an accident and a family friend and how it all worked out for everyone. The details would be washed away; for example, it would not be told as a great American love story for our time.

The next morning her garbage bags were lined up by the door. Any closer to the door and they’d march out by themselves. The famous Rachel came to help her move.

“I heard you’re starting a flavored popcorn company,” I said, burping Jack over my shoulder. She winced a little.

“I guess you could call it that. I mean, technically that’s what it is.”

Clee banged in the front door and grabbed two bags, eyeing our conversation. Rachel was very skinny and Jewish-looking. She wore a blouse with diagonal pastel stripes that looked like it was from the 1980s; it was a joke about how silly the time before she was born was.

“Did I get it wrong? Clee said there would be gum popcorn?”

“It’s really hard to explain, because I’m working on a lot of different levels?” She heaved the biggest bag over her shoulder. “I’m surprised she even told you about it.”

“Well, she just told me the gum popcorn level of it.”

She looked me all the way down and all the way back up, landing not on my eyes but on my neck.

Clee huffed inside, grabbing the last bag. “That’s everything!”

“Really?” I looked around. “The bathroom?”

“I checked that.”

“All right, then.”

She rubbed the top of Jack’s head. “Goodbye, Little Dude. Don’t forget about your Aunt Clee.” Aunt. When had she decided that? He grabbed her hair; she freed herself. Rachel took out her phone and turned away; this was the moment allotted for our goodbye. Clee was looking antsy. I doubted she would come every Friday at ten A.M. She held her arms open like a friendly bear. “Thanks for everything, Cheryl. I’ll call you guys tonight.”

“You don’t have to call.”

“I’ll call.”

We watched them get into her car and drive away and then we walked around the house. The rooms sounded different, higher ceilinged, empty.

It used to always be like this , I explained. This is the normal way the house usually is .

Did she not leave anything? he asked. Nothing?

We searched every room. She had been very thorough. The envelope between the books was gone; so was the soda can tab. We did finally find one thing she’d forgotten.

I carried the sundrop crystal from the bathroom and hung it in the kitchen above the sink. Jack watched it clatter against the glass a few times, then spin silently.

Rainbows . I pointed to a flock of them gliding across the wall. His little mouth hung open in transfixed awe.

This kind of thing is more along the lines of what I was expecting , he said. This will for sure be my top interest, my area of focus.

Rainbows?

And everything else like this.

There is nothing else like this. Rainbows are alone; they’re the only thing like that.

The crystal began to wind the other way, sending the bright fleet back across his body. I could tell he didn’t believe me; it did seem unlikely. I racked my brain for others of the species. Reflections, shadows, smoke — these things were morose and distant cousins at best. No, rainbows are in their own class of spectacularity, every single one of them impressive, never a bleak rainbow, never with just some of the colors. Always all the colors and always in the right order. She didn’t call.

EVERY DAY I MELTED Amilk icicle and watched Jack drink what Clee had pumped exactly one month earlier, each bottle labeled with a date. First he drank the day we made love; he gulped it all down. He drank the day we showed him off at Ralphs. He drank the cotton-candy milk from the day at the pier. The last batch was from the morning she left and this milk was full of plans I didn’t know about. When he finished that bottle she was really gone, every last drop of her. But the habit of remembering what had happened a month ago was hard to let go of, so we continued. As he drank his first bottle of formula I remembered our first night alone, the house bitterly quiet until I turned on the TV. I remembered remembering making love and crying right onto Jack, right into his eyes. When she had been gone for a full two months I remembered melting the last of her milk and thinking she was really gone now, every last drop. I burped him and that was all — I didn’t start over again with triple remembering.