Kelly Link: Get in Trouble: Stories

Alan came and stood behind the couch. He put his drink down and began to rub her neck.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “That storm.”

“Remember when we were kids? That hurricane?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I probably ought to go haul the storm shutters out of the storage unit. We got pounded last summer.”

He went and got the pitcher of frozen rum. Came back and stretched out on the floor at her feet, the pitcher balanced on his stomach. “That kid at your warehouse,” he said. He closed his eyes.

“Jason?”

“He seems like a nice kid.”

“He’s a philosophy student, Lan-Lan. Come on. You can do better.”

“Do better? I’m thinking out loud about a guy with a fine ass, Lindsey. Not buying a house. Or contemplating a career change. Oops, I guess I am officially doing that. Perhaps I’ll become a do-gooder. A do-better.”

“Just don’t make my life harder, okay? Alan?” She nudged him in the hip with her toe, and watched, delighted, as the pitcher tipped over.

“Fisfis tuh!” Alan said. “You did that on purpose!”

He took off his shirt and tossed it at her. Missed. There was a puddle of pink rum on the tile floor.

“Of course I did it on purpose,” she said. “I’m not drunk enough yet to do it accidentally.”

“I’ll drink to that.” He picked up her Rum Runner and slurped noisily. “Go make another pitcher while I clean up this fucking mess.”

do the monster

“He’s got gorgeous eyes. Really, really green. Green as that color there. Right at the eye. That swirl.”

“I hadn’t noticed his eyes.”

“That’s because he isn’t your type. You don’t like nice guys. Here, can I put this on?”

“Yeah. There’s a track on there, I think it’s the third track. Yeah, that one. Elliot loved this song. He’d put it on, start twitching, then tapping, then shaking, all over. By the end he’d be slithering all over the furniture.”

“Oh, yeah. He was a god on the dance floor. But look at me. I’m not too bad, either.”

“He was more flexible around the hips. I think he had a bendier spine. He could turn his head almost all the way around.”

“Come on, Lindsey, you’re not dancing. Come on and dance.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be such a pain in the ass.”

“I have a pain inside,” she said. And then wondered what she meant. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”

“Come on. Just dance. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m okay. See? I’m dancing.”

Jason came to dinner. Alan wore one of Elliot’s shirts. Lindsey made a perfect cheese soufflé, and she didn’t even say anything when Jason assumed that Alan had made it.

She listened to Alan’s stories about various pocket universes he’d toured as if she had never heard them before. Most were owned by the Chinese government, and as well as the more famous tourist universes, there were the ones where the Chinese sent dissidents. Very few of the pocket universes were larger than, say, Maryland. Some had been abandoned a long time ago. Some were inhabited. Some weren’t friendly. Some pocket universes contained their own pocket universes. You could go a long ways in and never come out again. You could start your own country out there and do whatever you liked, and yet most of the people Lindsey knew, herself included, had never done anything more adventuresome than go for a week to some place where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you’d read as a child; a brochure; a dream.

There were sex-themed pocket universes, of course. Tax shelters and places to dispose of all kinds of things: trash, junked cars, bodies. People went to casinos inside pocket universes more like Vegas than Vegas. More like Hawaii than Hawaii. You must be this tall to enter. This rich. Just this foolish. Because who knew what might happen? Pocket universes might wink out again, suddenly, all at once. There were best-selling books explaining how that might happen.

There was pocket-universe spillover, too. Alan began to reminisce about his adolescence in a way that suggested that it had not really been all that long ago.

“Venetian Pools,” he said to Jason. “I haven’t been there in a couple of years. Since I was a kid, really. All those grottoes that you could wander off into with someone. Go make out and get such an enormous hard-on you had to jump in the water so nobody noticed and the water was so fucking cold! Can you still get baked ziti at the restaurant? Do you remember that, Lindsey? Sitting out by the pool in your bikini and eating baked ziti? But I heard you can’t swim now. Because of the mermaids.”

The mermaids were an invasive species, like the iguanas. People had brought them from one of the Disney pocket universes as pets, and now they were everywhere, small but numerous in a way that appealed to children and bird-watchers. They liked to show off and although they didn’t seem much smarter than, say, a talking dog, and maybe not even as smart, since they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures, they were too popular with the tourists at the Venetian Pools to be gotten rid of. There were freshwater mermaids and saltwater mermaids — larger and more elusive — and the freshwater kind had begun to show up at Venetian Pools at least ten years ago.

Jason said he’d taken his sister’s kids. “I heard they used to drain the pools every night in summer. But they can’t do that now, because of the mermaids. So the water isn’t as clear as it used to be. They can’t even set up filters because the mermaids just tear them out again. Like beavers, I guess. They’ve constructed this elaborate system of dams and retaining walls and structures out of the coral, these elaborate pens to hold fish. Venetian Pools sell fish so you can toss them in for the mermaids to round up. The kids were into that.”

“We get them in the canal sometimes, the saltwater ones,” Lindsey said. “They’re a lot bigger. They sing.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Lots of singing. Really eerie stuff. Makes you feel like shit. They pipe elevator music over the loudspeakers to drown it out, but even the kids felt bad after a while. I had to buy all this stuff in the gift shop to cheer them up.”

Lindsey pondered the problem of Jason, the favorite uncle who could be talked into buying things. He was too young for Alan. When you thought about it, who wasn’t too young for Alan?

Alan said, “Didn’t you have plans, Lindsey?”

“Did I?” Lindsey said. Then relented. “Actually, I was thinking about heading down to The Splinter. Maybe I’ll see you guys down there later?”

“That old hole,” Alan said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was sending out those old invisible death rays in Jason’s direction. Lindsey could practically feel the air getting thicker. It was like humidity, only skankier. “I used to go there to hook up with cute straight guys in the bathroom while Lindsey was passing out her phone number over by the pool tables. The good old days, right, Lindsey? You know what they say about girls with two shadows, don’t you, Jason?”

Jason said, “Maybe I should just head home.” But Lindsey could tell by the way that he was looking at Alan that he had no idea what he was saying. He wasn’t even really listening to what Alan said. He was just responding to that vibe that Alan put out. That come hither come hither come a little more hither siren song.

“Don’t go,” Alan said. Luscious, dripping invisible sweetness rolled off him. Lindsey knew how to do that, too, although she mostly didn’t bother now. Most guys, you didn’t have to. “Stay a little longer. Lindsey has plans, and I’m lonely. Stay a little longer and I’ll play you some of the highlights of Lindsey’s ex-husband’s collection of pocket-universe gay porn.”