Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

“You do believe I'm innocent, don't you? It's important to me.”

“Of course I do,” I tell him, although I don't. I think he's sobbing out of regret for his own dumb behavior, not over being wrongfully accused. I think it's only a matter of time before he gets arrested. Which makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing here, exactly, in this bar, with this man, investigating this half-interesting story. What if this is going to be my life from now on? What if, because I haven't chosen marriage and kids with Jeff, this is what I get? It doesn't seem fair.

Just because a person has an insurance policy that covers fire, it doesn't mean she wants her entire life to go up in smoke.

I drive Luther to an apartment building that hasn't seen better days and probably never will. When I pull up in front, he asks if I want to come in. With three or four drinks in me, I decide it might not be a bad idea to wait a while before driving home. But once we get inside he offers me another drink, and I say yes. He pours me a Scotch, neat, in a small glass.

His apartment looks like a motel room, with a bed and a TV in the living room and not much else. There are some dog-eared Reader's Digest books stacked in the corner, which look like church-basement giveaways. In the kitchenette is a small counter with two stools in front of it, and I sit down on one and sip. The Scotch is gone almost before I know it. Luther keeps puttering around the apartment, picking socks up off the floor, putting dishes in the sink, pulling lint off the sleeve of his sweater. And talking the whole time about how the fire's ruined him, how his wife left him once the water bed business started to go downhill, how he kept telling her that water beds would come back in style but how she didn't believe him, how she had no faith and wouldn't take the leap, how she wanted security, for everything to be pinned down.

“Let me ask you a question,” he says while pouring me more Scotch. “Do you think we're living in a classical or a romantic age? I think it's classical. I think there's no big emotions left, no passion. Everyone's concerned with self-preservation. It's about money, it's about safety. You know what I mean?”

I look at the Reader's Digest books. “Where do you get this stuff?”

“I read things,” he says.

“Is that a water bed you've got there?”

He shoots me a look.

“I've never actually been on one,” I say.

He holds out his arm in a gesture of welcome, the bottle of Scotch still in his hand. I lie down on my back, expecting it to swish and sway. Instead it feels basically solid, like any other mattress. Unfortunately I'm encountering other problems: the spins, for example. The water bed and I seem to lift up off the ground together, hurtling through space on a mission to some faraway planet. My palms feel very cold. I keep losing my grip on my glass. Luther Hodges is lying next to me, talking about back muscles and the even distribution of weight. The bed spins and flies, part water, part solid. I'm leaving earth and I'm all alone — no Jeff, no Mario, no camera — and it almost makes me cry, the agony and confusion of it, and I grab Luther by his grimy collar and pull him down closer to me, so that on this mission at least I'll have a warm body along for the ride.

I wake up regretful.

A few hours later I wake again and find I'm still in the apartment. In my dream I'd showered, dressed, and left Luther behind — but apparently never got around to doing it for real. A middle-aged man is lying next to me, smelling of middle-aged sweat. I think I've just violated a bunch of journalistic ethics. I remember what one of my journalism professors used to say: “When you find you're starting to break all the rules I've taught you, you'll know you're finally working in news.”

I get dressed slowly, my stomach several steps behind me. Luther's snoring is soft and buzzing and regular, like a small appliance. He doesn't budge as I leave the place, stepping out into the cold morning. The temperature's the same as it has been, but today the cold doesn't feel bitter. It just feels numb, inevitable. I'm not even surprised when Jeff and Aurora pull up to the curb. Why wouldn't they be here? It's their case.

I walk toward them, all of our three breaths pluming in the air. I can see that Aurora knows right away what has happened, and that Jeff doesn't, because his brain won't admit to it, won't let him see it, even though there are simple explanations for most things. I know that this, as much as my future in news, explains why I couldn't ever marry him. He isn't unobservant; he just can't imagine that someone he loves could be so different from himself.

“He must be asleep,” I tell them. “I couldn't get him to come to the door.”

“Probably passed out,” Jeff says.

“Probably,” I agree.

He looks at me closely, and for a second I think he registers my hangover, my bleary eyes, my skin that Luther Hodges has touched with his doughy little hands. “You're up early,” he says.

“News never sleeps,” I say.

I head home and shower and check messages. There's only one and it's from Jeff, from last night. He's calling to tell me that the homeless man in Cranston has been identified by workers at a downtown shelter. So far as they know, the guy didn't have any family. He gets to the end of the message and then stops talking for a couple of seconds, as if he expects me, impossibly, to say something back. It's the moment of hope that gets me, that pause on the line before he hangs up.

The kid was screaming, and Gayle's sister seemed helpless to stop him. He stood on the steps of the swimming pool in the backyard, its serene turquoise water shimmering in the afternoon sun, oblivious to his complaints. Gayle, watching, was tempted to cover her ears. It had been two years since she'd seen the kid, and in that time something had gone seriously wrong. To begin with, his head had grown way out of proportion to his body, although she couldn't quite tell if this was part of the problem or only some sorry accompaniment to it. More disturbingly, from the second she'd arrived at the house he'd been screaming his head off, almost literally: his wide, chubby face swollen and red, his enormous head flung back, wobbling above the tiny stem of his neck as if threatening to detach. All this because he wanted to eat macaroni and cheese and Gayle's sister, Erica, didn't have any in the house.

“Be soft, Max,” Erica kept saying. “Be soft.”

The kid did not want to be soft. Softness was last on his list of priorities.

“It's not fair!” he screamed, his face getting, impossibly, even redder. Twin streams of mucus ran out of his nose and down his chin. His little hands kept twisting the hem of his striped T-shirt in an anguished, strangely adult, Lady Macbeth — like gesture.

Erica knelt beside him, her face level with his, wheedling. “Why don't we go inside and have some bagel pizzas?”

“I hate bagel pizzas,” was the kid's response. “You said I could have mac and cheese, and I want mac and cheese! It's. Not. Fair!”

“I could run out to the store and get some, if you want,” Gayle said. At this her sister turned and stared as if she'd suggested capital punishment, or jail time, or selling the kid into slavery. It was not, apparently, the appropriate solution.

“What are you thinking?” Erica said. She always asked rhetorical questions when she was mad. “He needs to learn you can't always get what you want. Isn't that right, Max? Isn't that what you need to learn?”

“No, it's not. It's not what I need to learn at all !” He curled his hands into fists and beat them against Erica's chest. Gayle flinched. He was hitting hard.