Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Sometimes I wonder why I even come out here,” Taz said. It looked like she might start crying.

“Why do you?”

“I don’t know. That night at the party… I have this idea, maybe, that we’re kind of the same.”

“We’re not the same.”

“No,” she said. “You’re much more of an asshole.”

This wasn’t a joke. She rummaged in the backpack and pulled out a beer for herself. A shooting star flared over the poppy preserve to the west. Dustin had never thought about the word before, “poppy,” but being out in the desert did this to him. Words stood up from their sentences and waved at him. It was all the emptiness, with no TV around to distract him.

“When I first started doing shit,” Taz said quietly, “my parents sent me to this therapist, Dr. Feferman, who used to show me pictures of things, dead birds or people kneeling in graveyards or yelling at each other, whatever, and ask me which one described the way I felt. But none did.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She sipped her beer. “I don’t know.”

Dustin felt something unspool inside him. He wondered if his face was the picture she was looking for. Surprisingly, this did not infuriate him. Another star streaked into oblivion, silent as a thought. He told Taz about how when he was little, he used to believe that meteor showers were things scientists used to clean off meteors. “I had this whole idea in my head about what they looked like. Sort of like a car wash, but with a conveyor belt.”

She laughed. “I had this thing about gold bullion. I heard the name somewhere, and all I knew is that my mom had bouillon cubes in the cupboard. I thought it was a kind of soup made out of gold. I used to look for it whenever we went out to eat, gold bullion, under the appetizers.” She frowned. “For years, I had this vision of a beautiful, expensive soup, totally delicious.”

Dustin chugged his beer, actual gulps. It enraged him that there was no such thing as gold soup. He would add this to his list of injustices.

“You shouldn’t drink so much,” Taz said.

“So my mom tells me.”

“She knows about your drinking?”

He shrugged. “Like my parents are going to kick me out, a scarred-up cripple.” Dustin chucked the empty can with his left hand, awkward as a girl. “Anyway, it makes me itch less. It’s medicinal.”

Just saying the word “itch” made his arm prickle all over. He scratched at his Jobst shirt, wishing he could dig into the flesh. Sometimes he had dreams of this sort: he scratched and scratched and scratched, until he’d dug through the skin and was scraping marvelously at bone.

“Can you take that thing off?” Taz said.

“My Jobst?”

“I could scratch you. If you want.”

Dustin blushed. He tried to remember if there was any more beer hiding in the fridge. “We should head back.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

“No. I’m just supposed to keep it on all the time.”

Taz laughed. “Come on. You shower, right? I don’t think ten minutes will matter.”

He could have refused to sit down with her, but he didn’t. When he was still in the hospital, he often thought about what it would be like to have a girl touch him. The idea had seemed preposterous. Who would ever want to lay a finger on him? At the time, he couldn’t even touch himself. In the night, haunted by dreams, he was his former, naked, unrepulsive self, girls from his past sucking him or riding him or fondling him in twos until he stained his sheets. Waking up was like the end of life, a loss that made him gasp. Now a girl wanted to scratch him, nothing more, and he couldn’t move from fear.

“Could you, um, take it off yourself?”

Gingerly, Taz unzipped the arms of his Jobst shirt before scrutch ing open the Velcro that fastened around his chest. Dustin couldn’t look at her. Her hair smelled like rotten eggs. There was a moment, after she’d slid the shirt down his arms, when he thought she was too horrified to speak.

“You can’t even see them,” Taz said. “The scars.”

“It’s nighttime.”

“The moon’s pretty bright.” She looked away from him. “Anyway, I lied. You can see them.”

“So you’re saying they’re ugly,” Dustin said, trying to laugh.

“A little bit.”

She asked for his hand and then took off the Isotoner glove, peeling it inside out until all his burns were visible. If he were still in love with her, he could never have done this. Slowly, as if it were a doctor’s order, she began to scratch him. She held his fingertips in one hand and raked her nails up and down his arm, all the way to the shoulder, digging hard enough that it hurt, leaving a trail of sting that lingered wonderfully until the nails returned. The relief was incredible. He could scratch himself raw, but it was like the difference between jerking off and getting laid. Taz moved up to his chest and began to scratch him in circles, swirling her nails around, soothing a misery he’d forgotten was there. Dustin closed his eyes and tried not to think about how he looked, picturing himself as he used to be.

Later, he felt strangely bereft. It was only 10:45. She hadn’t done anything, really, only scratched him, but it was like waking up from one of his dreams. The throb of loneliness surprised him. He knew she had to be home by midnight, her parents would find out where she was — still, he couldn’t help wondering if she’d left before she had to. He couldn’t blame her, that was the worst part. Would he have wanted to touch a girl who looked like him?

Dustin put on The Searchers to distract himself. Ethan was jabbing the dirt with his knife, having just found Lucy’s ravaged body in the pass. Tonight he seemed less dumbly iconic than just plain dumb. Why didn’t he go home and leave everyone alone? What the hell was his problem? And why, of all movies, had this become Dustin’s favorite? He was just about to stop the VCR when someone knocked on the door, a gentle tap, as if Taz had decided to screw her parents and spend the night.

It was Jonas. Dustin couldn’t hide his disappointment. He was holding a guitar, a bottom-of-the-line Yamaha. He handed the guitar to Dustin: the neck had been duct-taped, and there was something funny about the strings. It took Dustin a second to realize they’d been strung in reverse order, with the low E at the bottom.

“What is this?” he said. “A joke?”

“I had to tape it, because the glue wouldn’t hold.”

Jonas stood by the bed, as if waiting for him to do something. Dustin looked at the soundboard, which had the words TOXIC SHOCK SYNDROM spray-painted on it. There must have been no room for the E . He strummed the strings to see if he could and the neck broke, springing up like a catapult.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, handing the thing back to Jonas. “Who sold you this piece of shit?”

Jonas held the broken guitar in his arms for a minute without moving. His lips were so chapped they looked like beef jerky. Cradling the instrument gently, as though it might wake up, he walked out of the room. Dustin overheard his father scolding him in the hallway. What on earth was he doing, bringing a guitar into the house? Didn’t he know better? It was only then that Dustin realized Jonas had brought the guitar to him as a gift. He felt a thickness in his throat. The feeling persisted until he remembered that Jonas didn’t seem remorseful for ruining his life. Did he really think a guitar, one Dustin couldn’t even fucking play, would help?

On TV, John Wayne spat charismatically, on his way to kill his own niece. Dustin found the remote control and switched him off.

Jonas sat in the front seat of the truck, which was so tall he could only see the roofs of cars as they passed, like clouds from an airplane. Occasionally someone with a sunroof would drive by, a hole in the clouds. Jonas’s backpack trembled at his feet. Among the items in his pack were a water bottle, a map of California, two bologna sandwiches, and a pack of cigarettes he’d stolen from his mother. He figured he might use the cigarettes as a way of extorting favors, since it seemed that people were often desperate to have them.