Adam Levin - Hot Pink

Brian, at the bottom of the stairs, overhears this. “Yeah!” he yells up. “And a fuckface, too. You want to slap me, now, Mike, you scrawny bitch? I don’t forget.”

Dad says, “Son.”

Brian says, “What? You’re gonna protect him?” Then he skims a ninja star at the ceiling and tears the stair carpet with a bowie knife.

By the third year of his inventor’s block, Dad can’t find the deep end he’d otherwise go off of and he becomes obsessed with the origin of the phrase, convinced that deep end refers to the deep end of a pool, which is not a thing he can reconcile with off-ness or on-ness. It’s all he talks about, if he talks at all. He doesn’t show up at the dinner table anymore. He plucks a rusted chain-mail blouse from a dumpster by the theater and wears it all day without an undershirt, eye-droppers lemon juice onto his chest before bed. One afternoon, he bites a small chunk of flesh off the back of his left hand and, every succeeding afternoon, rips the scab off with his teeth, then breaks out the dropper and does the raw red derm like it was his nipples.

On the eve of my brothers’ last day as sophomores, Claudia Berman rings the bell. They barrel down the stairs and Brian trips on the way and says Timmy tripped him. Timmy makes for the front lawn and Brian puts a tackle to Timmy’s knees, flips him over, and starts whaling on his face. I run outside to pull the skull-sapper out of Brian’s calf-sheath while Timmy, spouting purple from the nose and mouth, Brian’s forearm pressed against his trachea, flails his arms around, trying to get hold of something. He gets Brian’s ear. The left one. It comes off. Brian falls backward, on top of me, holding his earhole, bleeding less than I’d expect. Claudia screams Timmy’s name and runs inside for towels.

It’s the end of Brian’s alpha. It’s the end of Timmy’s optimism. It’s the end of a lot of things.

Dad takes bedding to the attic and sleeps on a slab.

Mom hits the local singles bars on Fridays.

Months pass.

Brian’s prosthetic ear — which the insurance company covers only half the cost of, thus engendering the misappropriation of tuition for my first year of college and destroying, once and for all, any false hopes I might have had of getting even a used Kia — starts coming loose on cold days and finally falls plum off after the Winter Formal Dance, while he’s walking to an Inspiration Point — bound Chevy with Claudia, for whom he knows he’s consolation meat. I graduate high school, turn eighteen years old, and when I try to enlist in the Coast Guard, they won’t have me. As I walk out of the recruiting office, the guy who’d been queued up behind me calls me a homo and I pretend not to hear because no one cares what I do anyway. Timmy wears all black all the time and, with hot irons and scalpels stolen from Dad’s lab, he mutilates his thighs and lower abdomen to absolve his guilt about Brian’s ear, which Brian keeps milking, the guilt. Mom starts dating a rhubarb farmer from Kenosha, telling me about it. She says he’s gentle, and clubfooted, but he loves her.

Our life, by this time, has become a cartoon. Maybe it’s an X-rated cartoon, and maybe it would seem more real if, in my bumbling, fleshy way, I weren’t trying so hard to make a prime-time morality play of it, but still: if on a certain moonlit evening in Arizona, I’d seen my mother drop off a cliff and go SPLAT, I doubt I’d be very surprised to find her cooking eggs in our kitchen the following morning. Rather, I’d be surprised to find her cooking, but if she were standing beside the stove, chewing her nails or talking to herself, I’d only squint a little before I believed it. And yes, it’s true that The Catcher in the Rye took ten years to write and no one’s cured cancer yet, but a Barbie with a working digestive system? We let him turn us into Looney Tunes for a high-concept doll?

On my nineteenth birthday, Dad hands me the card-stock receipt for a six-month subscription to Hustler , a block of two-by-four, and a tube of vitamin-enriched protein paste. He invites me into the lab and sits me down before a lathe-drill, props the two-by-four under the bit. Hand on the grip, eyes engoggled, he tells me, “You’re eighteen now. It’s about time you and your dad had a talk about girls and technology.”

“Okay,” I say.

“They don’t go together,” he says. “Look at me, Mike. Do you see?”

I look at him. He looks sick. He looks embarrassed. A pearl of saliva is drying whitely in the cleft of his chin. He smells like Mad Dog and burned plastic.

“I hate you,” I tell him.

“I hate me, too,” he says.

I start crying, which is pretty typical.

“It’s nothing to cry about, kiddo. Well, maybe it is. But wouldn’t it be a whole lot worse if I thought I was a good man? It would be irresponsible. It would lack rigor.”

He aligns the drill. When he moves, the chainmail against his chest-skin makes a noise like velcro. He picks at his scabs, forgets I’m there with him.

“What do you want, Dad?”

He snaps to, coughs something up and swallows it.

“Manage a restaurant,” he says. “Sell insurance. Harvest rhubarb like that Swedish guy. For chrissakes, though, don’t try to battle eating disorders with new technologies. Don’t create systems. Describe systems. The ideal doll is a girl, so don’t bother making dolls or trying to improve girls. I’ll tell you what. I’m not God. I’m not even any kind of Frankenstein. When you were born I bawled my eyes out because I knew I couldn’t do better. And then the twins. Them, too. But not a daughter. Never had one. How can I describe a girl if I’ve never had a daughter?”

“I’m gay.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“It’s got nothing to do with sense.”

“Well, either way, I got you the wrong subscription. And I’ve fastened the wrong drill bit. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” I lie.

“Is he nice to you? I mean, does he treat you well?”

“He’s okay.”

“I suppose I’ve never met him because you’re embarrassed to bring anyone to the house… Listen. Don’t settle for a bunch of nonsense. You’re better than that. I don’t deserve to have you as a son. You’re a shining example of goodness and tolerance and I’m this crazy piece of shit over here. I’m trouble. It’s a privilege to even be despised by you—”

“Dad.”

“Ditch that boyfriend and find yourself a good one. Adopt a baby girl. Teach kindergarten. Don’t worry about humanity. Love humans , boy-o, be close to them. Let humanity work things out for itself. You’ll be a happy man. You know you enliven me? You’re an endless well of hope!”

He drapes his arm over my shoulders, squeezes. “Do you think you were born gay, or was it the way you were raised?”

“Born,” I say.

Then, as suddenly as Kekule’s snake became a benzene ring, Dad theoretically solves the problem of the smell of paste. His face twitches.

“Son of mine!” he says. “My son!”

He figures out that changing the makeup of the paste isn’t the answer, but that copper-coating small portions of the plastic joints in the mini-tract will cause the digested paste — in its present form — to stink up real bad upon its regurgitation or elimination, and now all he has to work out is (1) how to push forth the hairs in the follicles in the Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips that he’s embedded in the rubber over Bonnie’s upper lip and below her navel, and (2) how to trigger them at the appropriate time, i.e., when Bonnie becomes “anorexic.”

To actually sprout the hairs, it’s a simple matter of activating microgram weights and polymer pulleys not dissimilar to those used in the mini-tract system. As for the situation-appropriate triggering of the sprouting activation, Dad decides to plant a function on a microchip, the workings of which are a little bit beyond me, but entail the delicate balancing of a paste-intake equation with a limb-movement equation. A large enough imbalance translates to “anorexia” and, depending on the degree of the imbalance, commands certain weights to shift and certain pulleys to pull so that one or both of the embedded Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips can do what they were made to do.