Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Happy birthday,” said Caleb.

“Yeah.”

“You’re angry.”

“No.”

“On Barsoom we have a ritual of forgotten birthdays. When someone forgets, the offended shoots the offender with a harmless kama gun. Then we have a party.” He handed me his gun, butt first.

“Knock off the Mars shit a minute,” I said.

“Sometimes we use a zona gun, which is needlessly harmful,” he said and put the gun back in his pocket and took my hand. I squeezed it.

At McDonald’s Caleb spent five minutes trying to order a Happy Meal, except he was calling it a Biba Fa, and the guy behind the counter didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

“One of the ones in the box,” I said. I didn’t want to say Happy Meal because I would prefer not to buy into fucking McDonald’s newspeak. Sometimes Frieda tells me to watch my language, and she doesn’t mean don’t say fuck, she means don’t say Whopper or Barbie’s Dream House or Happy Meal.

“We’ve got all kinds of boxes, if you want boxes,” said the man. “All the big sandwiches come in boxes.” Usually I have to fight like hell to order anything but a Happy Meal, because they start shoving them at you as soon as you open your mouth.

“Biba Fa!” says Caleb, for the tenth time. “Are you deaf?”

“You know,” I said. “A children’s meal.”

“Oh,” the man said. “A Happy Meal. Why didn’t you say so?” We just looked at him. I didn’t want a fucking Happy Meal, but the guy brought two and I just wanted to sit down. So I paid him and we sat by the window, looking out on NW Thirty-sixth Street, at all the airline buildings, which depressed me because they have to do with planes and flight and Papa going down in the swamp. I gave Caleb my top and then unwrapped my hamburger and looked at it.

“Hey,” Caleb said. “This is called the Ela Ecksta formation.” He spun the two tops toward each other.

“Eat,” I told him. He put down the tops and started tracing his finger on the back of the box. “I’m going to eat your food if you don’t start eating it right now.” He picked up his hamburger, then smelled it and took a little bite. I bit into mine and thought it tasted like disappointment. And then I thought, You little baby, it’s just a birthday, and it means nothing. And then I thought, Happy birthday to me. And then I thought, Fuck!

Mama came in after midnight to say sorry. Caleb was asleep, worn out from watching TV all evening, which is something we can’t do when Mama’s home, but I think it’s a good idea for him to see Nicholas on Eight Is Enough and perhaps want to be like him.

I was staring at our ceiling, at the fake glue-on constellations that Papa gave me last birthday. I was doing powers of three, which usually makes me sleepy. When she came in and started singing I lost count. She stood right by our bed. I looked over and saw her head, a dim shape underneath the false stars.

She was singing some dumb-ass song to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” about how she was sorry and she loved me and I lived in a zoo, and she hoped I would forgive her because she felt like a shoe. She had got herself a pretty severe vodka voice and I could see Milo swaying in the doorway. She reached out and touched my hair.

“Three,” I said. “Nine. Twenty-seven. Eighty-one.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Two hundred and forty-three. Seven hundred and twenty-nine.”

“I didn’t mean to. I thought it was tomorrow. I thought the seventh was tomorrow.”

“Two thousand one hundred eighty-seven. Six thousand five hundred sixty-one.”

“I’m so sorry. I know how mad you are.”

“Nineteen thousand six hundred eighty-three. I’m not mad.”

“Sure you are. You’ve got every right to be.”

“Am not.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. Birthdays don’t matter.”

“Sure they matter.”

“Not to me.”

“Come on out and we’ll have a little party.”

“No thanks.”

“Come on. I’ll sing you another song.”

“I’ll just go to sleep now.”

“Please, come out for me. I got you a present.”

So I got down and held her arm as we walked through the door, so she wouldn’t tip over. Milo reached to take her in the hall, but I pulled her right past him into the living room, because I didn’t want it to be like I was giving her to him. Papa’s been dead for nine months but they were divorced for a year before that.

She and Milo appear to be a pretty sure thing. He is not a bad sort — tall and handsome with a big heart and red hair and green eyes, a real Ashkenazi gem, as he describes himself. I do not mind him usually, but sometimes he annoys me.

“Mazel tov, Markie!” he said to me in the living room, pouring himself a drink. He annoys me when he calls me Markie and when he pulls the Jewish-uncle shit. The uncle shit is bad enough alone but it’s worse when he rubs my shoulders and offers me piggyback rides like I’m three, or just hangs around being so friendly I want to poke out his eyes.

I sat down and looked at them both. “Get the present, Milo,” said Mama, collapsing across from me. Milo got a bag out of the kitchen and gave it to me. “This is temporary,” Mama said. “Real present comes later.” Inside the bag were black beans and a can of rice and some frozen chicken.

“It’s for your birthday feast!” she said, but it was obviously the sort of thing a pair of drunks could pick up at the all-night Cuban market. I nearly threw the chicken at her because she was smiling so sweetly, like this was the chicken of love or something, but I didn’t, because at least she had tried.

“Feliz navidad!” said Milo.

“I’m really tired,” I said.

“Poor baby,” said Mama, standing up and wobbling over to put both her hands on my face. “You go to sleep and dream of your birthday feast, your big birthday party.”

“I’d rather not have a party.”

“You dream of a party,” she said. Milo winked at me, and he was lucky I didn’t happen to be carrying an awl. I went to my room and got in bed and closed my eyes, but I could hear their voices, and the ice in their drinks was making this terrible fucking racket, so I got down again and shut the door, which Caleb doesn’t like, because on Mars terrible things happen in the dark.

After school Ouida Montoya pulls up alongside me while I’m walking down a lonely stretch of De Soto. “Time for your ride,” she says.

“No thanks,” I say.

“You sure?” she asks. All day she read poetry. There was no more voting after recess, we just had to take it. We got more Dickinson, and Yeats and Keats and Shelley and Mistress Shovel-face Bradstreet. And she never let up on me. “Who’s this one, Con? How about this one?”

“Would you please leave me alone,” I say, very calm indeed.

“I will not,” she says. “I know you! We have something in common. Something so special, and so horrible.”

I throw my books against her Volvo, not harming it at all but making a loud noise. She stops the car.

“Come on, lady!” I shout. “Just don’t fuck with me, okay? Just fly yourself right out of my life!” She opens her door. I step up close to her — her face is about even with mine when she’s sitting — and scream, “Fuck the fuck!” I don’t even know what that means. All I want is for her to leave me alone.

But now she’s mad. She grabs me by the front of my white uniform shirt and pulls me right over her lap, throwing me down on the passenger side, so my head is where your feet ought to be. Then she takes off, and I feel the bumps when she runs over my books.

“What are you doing! What the fuck are you doing?”

“Just be quiet,” she says, pinching the bridge of her nose with one hand and steering with the other. “I’m very angry. I’m very angry and you need to let me calm down.” She squints, and pinches so hard I can see the tendons flexing in her wrist. She drives faster and faster, barreling down De Soto, past my house, past the McDonald’s and out onto NW Thirty-sixth.