Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

The climax? Dad asked, I said, It all has to be in the mood or tone if there’s anything distinguishing mood from tone or in the way that waitressing Patty leaned like a wiperag hanging from the window’s backpocket — leaned across the counter to swipe herself out for the day and her manager, that’s how he’s characterized, “her manager,” rushed over and pinched her but she straightened out and smacked his hand from pinching again and went to walk out the door to stand at the busstop and this, this harassment, was daily, Whose harassment? Dad asked, did her murderer pick her up usually? He pulled around the block to pull up alongside her at the leafpiled curb and that shocked her, I said, she didn’t know what to do or say but acted like he hadn’t just witnessed what happened, maybe he’d missed it or would forget that he hadn’t with the sunglasses over twelve stitches smile she gave as she opened the door and got in, but as soon as she was seated and had shut the door she knew that he’d seen it because he leaned over the stickshift to kiss her, which is something he never did, that not being the kind of thing this character would do, Why not? Dad asked, what’s he scared of? But this kiss—“this pinch of lips” “this stitch of kiss”—was only a diversion, I said, because with one hand on the wheel he stabbed her, stabbed her with his switch and she screeched and overtop the casualty of her screech the tires smoked as he shifted to streak away, straightened the car and pulled his knife out of her then her body toward him to toss over the median stick into the backseat where she rolled and thumped, the knife he dropped to the floor unwashed white, washed in red with the knife kept inside her body thumping and rolling around the backseat slicing the wound open wider to pour its packet of ketchup—“that condiment the color of love,” And he did this why? Dad asked, I can’t understand his motivation, I said, If I wanted to have a body thumping in the backseat of a car, the car had to be in motion and the body had to be dead, and if I wanted the body to be dead, Patty had to be killed, So you began this whole thing just to have a body bumping around? Dad asked, Like the secondhand of a clock, I said, the sweeperhand if you want to get poetic about it, like the Atlantic lapping against a jetty or your testicles slapping up against a woman’s own backseat as you rut at her sexually from behind, Do you always just write from or toward one idea? Dad asked, and is that one idea always so fucking moronic? But the idea was for the body’s bump to symbolize time, I said, and while the sound is time ticking the image isn’t so much the dead body as it is the car driving around with the dead body inside, rolling and thumping and thumping and rolling, So you have all that to what end? Dad asked, I said, That’s probably when the monologue comes in, when Ronald Ray whose name makes him sound like a multiple killer already and who certainly looks like a killer with his bleared face but whetsharp nose tries to figure out what to do in first person, not just what to do with the body like should I chop it up somewhere abandoned and into what amounts but also what to do in the aftermath, how to feel, crank the tears, check under the hood for a heart or soul, consternation Ronald Ray — this is the junction in the story where I/he make(s) plans and alibis, complots turned conspiracies for the authorities and surviving fam, Like what? Dad asked, Like I was going to pick her up at the diner and she saw me and was running to me across the street waving when she was hit by a car, a van or truck that said across the side of its haul Someone’s Grocery, like I just showed up to pick her up and was waiting for her running to me waving when a man came around the corner he was Afric I think to sink like this knife into her incalculable times until she expired there in my arms dragging her into my car, which is why I didn’t call an ambulance, But does she have to die? Dad asked, does she have to die so terribly? But death on the page is just a typo, I said: You can’t say for example, She is dead —“she” no longer is. You can’t say for example, She was dead —death itself, a condition coterminous with eternity, renders the past tense inaccurate. But what does it mean that death is just some sort of mistake? Dad asked, some only known to writers language error? But there is no Dad, there never was any Dad, my own father would never ask such questions, my own father would never have had the patience to listen to me talk about literature let alone about my own literature or murder and sex in some ineptly imagined Midwestern state though I think that unlike the afterdinner drunk sextalk about rear entry testicular thwacking, which would’ve offended him, the violence would’ve only made him uncomfortable (Are you sure his car’s a manual transmission? is something he might ask, however, Why not just make it an automatic and not have to deal with the shifting, the shifts?), just as certain other things unsettle me, certain things and times and places, the here and now and certain Words.

Ronald Ray drives, Mom. Lights sparkle as they shoot across his glass. A compact car filled to spill with hemoglobinic wine. When do lights become light? Can something that sparkles also shoot? Mom, you used to be able to answer every question lightly. Ronald Ray passes trees. He passes a mailbox flagged with wilting balloons. Why do balloons wilt (I was six when I asked that)? How does the mail know how to get from Popop’s house to us (I was four when you took me out to meet the mailman)? He passes a theater marquee advertising the year of my birth, also the year of his and Patty’s for convenience. What is parkinglot and what not? Which is tree and which just pole for phones?

Mom, he drives and I leave him driving to call you Hello, calling you not on your workphone because it’s too early for work but on the homephone because Fridays you don’t work but are up early out of habit and I listen to you talk, to your stories about your old friends I don’t like — who have children my age whose successes I don’t like — about your new friends whose names I don’t recognize, to what you’re cooking as if smell travels through newer model phones, I listen to recipes and your dairyfree, glutenfree modifications, about the trip you’re planning to the Santa Fe Aunts, the intermediate pottery class you’re taking and the inflammatory bowel disease support group you volunteer with and he drives. He is as lost as a 1:1 map — whereas I’m still only partly awake, despite this being a call I initiated, a call I now want to end, I have to be at work in an hour (and I’m fresh out of gunpowder — the tea).

This is like the Ford, Mom, as it involves other names. It involves what I’ve told you and what I haven’t and just like mothers lie to children not only about where air goes to and mail and phonecalls come from but also about difficult subjects like death and God and can God die? most children lie to parents too, though my lies have been mostly moronic — mine have been lies of omission (and so you can understand why I’ve forgotten to tell you about them until now). I’ve told you I work at a pharmaceutical company, a few times I might even have said a pharmaceutical multinational —as if the sum of the countries malignly conspiring factor into my salary — but what I haven’t told you is that I work as a proofreader. That’s it, as a copyeditor, the lowliest of editors, a reader not even a writer, I’m not allowed to write, I’ve never met the writers. Their copy just shows up in my 9 AM email from close of business in Delhi or Lahore, and I’m supposed to go through it — the label materials, the innards instructions for use — and mark mistakes. It doesn’t take a native to spot misspelled symptoms and dropped articles the and an, but it does take a native to sweat being outsourced every quarter (will Lahore proof Delhi? or Delhi proof Lahore?).