Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

I wanted to show her how nothing was changed between us — I hoped and was determined that it wouldn’t be — so late in the morning I woke her with a delicate stroking of her breasts, and then, as it was made clear that what I was doing was acceptable, I kissed a straight line from the top of her forehead and between the eyes clear on down to her thicket and buried my face there gently. Her fingers in my bed-frizzed hair. Neither of us finished. Finishing wasn’t the point, not this time, and knowing that made me feel like we were both of us older than we had ever been before. But then, in the bathroom, in the horrible motel light, I stared at the reflection in the mirror and felt like a stupid kid. A not unwelcome sensation. I had blood smeared on my lips and chin like some gnarly animal. I was wild-eyed, pasty-pale, with dime-size nipples and a shitty sprig of hair that didn’t nearly cover the space between them. I looked at this bedraggled figure and knew it as myself and saw myself seeing myself and knowing myself in this way, and I got started laughing so hard my whole body shook, and Cass came in to see what the matter was. I couldn’t tell her, didn’t know how, but it was enough, I think, for her to know that there was cause for laughter. She joined in, then grabbed me by my unabated hard-on, aimed it at the bathtub and set me free.

This is not to say everything was okay, painless and sweet every moment thereafter, only that it was those things right then. And that we deserved them. We showered together, stood beneath the hot stream, took turns washing each other’s backs. We checked out of that awful, rundown place and started back a day early toward our shit town, which, it turned out, had let our absence pass largely unmarked.

The world is not brimming over with grace, but it does have some.

There’s no great conclusion to me and Cass. We were bound by something that could neither break us nor lift us up. It did not make us other or better than we were. Why should it have? I took her to senior prom, which was real nice, and we sometimes talked about loving each other or being in love, but we were using the words just to use them, like practicing for when we’d really need them sometime in the future. I knew she’d gone back to messing around on me and I never gave her grief about that. After I finished school I had less patience for her studying, and we sort of both started to move on, though I always said hello when I saw her now and again, at parties, usually, except for the quarter she spent in perfect seclusion, studying to retake the SATs and boost her score into the very top percentile, which she damn well did, not that I was surprised to learn it. Soon enough after that she was gone. We became ourselves, is what happened, and whenever I miss her I remind myself of that. But don’t think this is a story about true love gained and then lost forever, because it’s not like I think about Cass often, and many times even when I do I don’t miss her at all. I’m happy for wherever she’s got to, if it’s anyplace good.

Joe Brown at first didn’t understand. He knew it was different between me and her, somehow, but his main concern was the fact that I would no longer tell him dirty stories about Cass McElroy’s sweet, sweet pussy that never got sore, or even say anything about my hot threeway.

He kept on pestering me.

I finally called him a fucking deviant to his face about it, one night in the sick grip of summer, when it’s so hot people are only living to find new ways to bring hate into the world. I thought of the weasel who had stood in our path, and put everything I’d had for that man onto Joe Brown, which wasn’t right, but it’s what happened. We had a fist fight, real serious too. Came out bruised, bloodied, and sore — more brothers than ever. Joe Brown might not have had a way with girls, but he lifted and he ran. He was strong. Whipped me, if the truth is to be told about it. A year later he said he had decided to enlist, and three months after they sent him over he was gone. He was in an unarmed Humvee, driving it, in fact, down a desert road and rolled right over an IED. We buried what they sent home.

And Judge should have died the night his trailer’s electric hookup faltered and sparked a whole box of M-80s, which set off a thundering like a movie drive-by and sent the whole place up. He was spared on account of not being home, though the mother of the twin boys and one of the twins were there, both asleep, which further suggested that Judge had been playing at his version of family man before slipping out to get away with one more damn thing. The other boy, who had gone to have a sleepover at a friend’s house, now lives with his aunt’s family in Baltimore, and Judge lives to rave and spit for another season. He may outlast the rest of us yet.

But I don’t want to finish on a down note, so since I didn’t tell the rest about how it turned out with Ma and my sister and the drugs, let me get back to that now.

Ma found Kyra puking up all over herself, her bed, her room — and then Ma. There was an ambulance. Stomach pump plus IV drip. A three-day stay at the hospital and then six months of mandatory counseling sessions to see if she was lying about the accident and had maybe done the thing on purpose.

They say He works in mysterious ways. I used to not know what that meant but now I do. Not to say whether I believe it is the true case, but I understand what it means and why people say it. The aftermath of this ugly episode was a cleansing effect upon our household. Holding her own daughter’s head up by the hair, wearing the vomit, slapping the girl to keep her conscious until the ambulance men came — all these things got Ma a little bit more invested in the soul’s particular vessel here on earth and in earthly things in general. Not to say she didn’t take Kyra’s surviving for an obvious miracle, but still. Caring for her recovering daughter woke up her natural instinct to be kind. It shook her condition loose.

Kyra, meanwhile, in the midst of her close call, in her near-death state, saw the Lord, and He told her some things that set her to rights. Belief-wise, each got knocked a few pegs in the other’s direction. If my old man ever came back this is what I would show him: his daughter and the mother of his daughter, how they are like sisters now. I would say, Forget everything else, this here is what you lost out on. This is what was once all yours.

Ma and Kyra, thick as thieves, go together to First Presbyterian, and if you do not engage them on the topic of queers or of Democrats you will see that they are good Southern women, full with love. I swear they mean the world no harm.

Jennie is sleeping when it comes but I’m awake, in my underwear, face slick with sweat. Our air conditioner has stopped working. The brownouts had been ongoing for about a month when one day— zap . Too much starting and stopping, I guess. At least the power’s flowing right now. The TV and the Nintendo, I am thankful, still work. The Nintendo especially is a miracle on account of that it’s so old anyway.

The sunlight is indirect — our house has good tree cover — but the temperature is high. Jennie’s naked. She is tall, solid, pretty, and currently not speaking to me — I mean she wouldn’t be if she were awake. We’ve been arguing lately because she says I don’t do anything but play Tetris anymore and I always ask what the fuck else would she like me to do. Sometimes she picks up the Bible and thumbs through it. She doesn’t know this, but I stole that Bible from a motel, one night way back before all the trouble started. Weird lights in the sky and nobody sure what was happening, if it was God or the government responsible, i.e., who to blame or praise. The book is inscrutable to her, though she’s become steadily more convinced it is trying to tell her something. She’s mad at me because I took a few religion courses in college but I won’t help. I won’t even look at the damned thing. Earlier today I told her (again) that I studied Islam and modernity, not Christian anything, and that if she wanted to go loot a Koran from the already ransacked Books-A-Million down the street, then I would gladly give her my class notes and term papers when she got back.