Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

Some night:

We’re messing around and she starts wishing aloud that we had some rope to play with. I think my belt, the braided kind, can suffice. She makes fun of my idea. A couple loops and twists later there she is, wrists bound behind her, tits stuck thrust forward. She’s surprised, pleased; shakes them a little. I leave her underwear on and knock her around some, watching it darken.

I flip her on her back and wave my cock in her face. “No,” she says, “not in this bed, my boyfriend was just in this bed.” That’s part of it, I guess. I untie her after a while. She’s finishing me off. I’m on my back, she’s got a hand on my cock more or less like you’d hold a joystick. In my head I’m sort of flashing on some video games I’ve played. When the jizz arcs, some splatters the wall. “Goddamnit,” she says, then: “Well, you wrecked your fucking shirt, too.”

Once more with feeling, one of us says, and the other thinks this is just so funny.

My walk home:

When it’s very cold and I hock up and spit a good one there’s this blast of condensed breath that explodes out like a wintry comet behind the launch of saliva and phlegm and I think of what I think tracer bullet trails look like — every fifth round — and how it would be to have a gun that fired tracers, or a reason to have a gun that fired tracers. Yeah, that’s it, what I’m really after: not the gun, but the reason for having it. But right now it isn’t even cold so I guess I’m imagining that part too, and just spitting.

A different day:

Brendan is doubled over, laughing or pretending to laugh. Waving his arms around. Some theatrical skater bullshit. He puts gloves on, makes a joke about the meat slicer.

Today we are the bookends of a four-person operation, five if you include the girl who works the register, who is hot and mostly ignores us. We both notice when she looks over our way. She takes the orders and the money and a cigarette break every twenty-five minutes. Someone else toasts the bread and applies the meat and cheese I’ve sliced, another adds the vegetables or whatever else. Jalapeños and honey mustard; low-fat mayonnaise or that orange shit that goes on a Reuben. Brendan wraps them when they’re finished, stuffs each in a to-go bag with a slice of pickle wrapped in crinkly waxed paper. What this all translates to is that he and I don’t talk much. We are the poles of the production line, separated by the length and specifics of the gourmet sandwich gestation process. Have you had your way today? With who?

Meanwhile:

In Abu Ghraib, which is a dirty building somewhere in a desert, there are former AT RISKs once condemned by every guidance counselor. The grandchildren of immigrants who had the anarchism beaten out of them by cops in Chicago. Ambivalent patriots and even some true believers. And they’ve all been given loaded weapons and the keys to small rooms containing people that, as a matter of policy, they must learn to hate or else they already do.

I work and I work and I stare at this whirling blade and I think about everything while I slice the

— Ham

Which is roughly the shape of a loaf of bread, though wider and heavier and longer and pink as a boiled baby and is 11 percent water and comes wrapped in this plastic with a red crisscross design on it and when you slice it open a stream of orange-gray liquid spills out and then you pull the whole wrapping off and it makes a wet huck noise and a little more liquid spills into the stainless steel washbasin and the blade goes whir-whir when you start it up and you have to figure out what’s the good number to set the slicer to so that the meat slices are each three-quarters of an ounce. (Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet) and

— Turkey Breast

I think of that one soldier, the girl, with the cig on her lip and that smile (thumbs-up!) and I can’t help but think if she is so evil or lucky or something else I can’t imagine and how the turkey breast is roughly the size and weight of a bowling ball that has been squashed a bit — ovalish — it has a brown skin to simulate having been oven-roasted and it is 15 percent water and when you cut the plastic off the liquid spills out golden-brown and then you need to stick it in the freezer for a while so the water in it freezes (for the first time I saw her “pink and dark” flesh cooling) because if you cut it while it’s warm the water will run right out of it and leave minuscule paths and caverns through the wide pale center of the shiny wet bird-ball so that when you run it whiz-whiz-whiz over the blade it will make slices that fall into your waiting medical-gloved hand as streamers of turkey-ribbon or small piles of turkey-rags because it, like everything, loses coherence in the aftermath of losing essential waters attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture and okay duh it’s not like the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib were the first people in history to find themselves naked at the wrong end of a dog leash and

— Roast Beef

maybe what I really need to be thinking about Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture is what Andrea is thinking or if Will is hitting her and if he is is she thinking about Threatening male detainees with rape me and how each time

— Pepperoni

is like a first time: I wake up with her smell on me after dreaming of her smell; I know her body so well I could shop for her but every time she undresses I’m thrilled again to learn what she looks like naked and when she’s on her back, knees up, thighs like a foyer, I always find myself wondering despite all previous knowledge how will she taste, how will it be when our slick skins finally press hard and the act and all thoughts about the act meld into some third thing—

She is a magic trick and I am either the magician or the crowd.

My shift ends in the early afternoon but Brendan works till four o’clock so I get to say good-bye to him, passing close in the narrow corridor. If we were both skaters I guess we’d slap fives or I’d hit him in the back of the head for a prank or something. He wraps a steaming steak sandwich in tin foil. “Later,” I say and he says yeah, peace, or whatever. Puts the sandwich in a paper bag. Takes it back out and goes, “Ahh fuck, fuck this shit.”

A mailman on his lunch break is waiting for the steak sandwich Brendan is doing triage on. Maybe the kid who works the microwave forgot to melt the provolone cheese. It’s bad when you forget something, but it’s worse if you put the wrong thing on. Like if the guy said no mustard but you doused it and then realized. The whole thing gets junked and you start again, and the mailman just stands there. In the far corner on the shop’s big screen, Rumsfeld is being grilled about the torture photos. The boss has closed caption on and the volume off. Anyway it doesn’t matter. I’m out the door.

Phone call:

“I think Will knows.”

“Knows what? I mean how?”

“You fucking bruised me, is how.”

“How can he tell which bruises are his and which are mine?”

“What — Fuck. I don’t know. He probably can’t. But he thinks something.”

“Leave him. I’ll be good to you.”

“Fuck you.”

“No but we could—”

Click.

Numerology:

Class of 2000, that’s us. Me, Andrea, Will — one for each zero. They raised us to worship our own greatness, to believe ourselves touched by fortune. Destiny, whatever. They put all their faith in the calendar’s promise, that glistening fake-out, and we came of age in time to vote but it turned out to be the one when votes stopped counting, if they ever did, and they sent us off to school and we went and then we finished and there was nowhere left to go. The streets are empty. The air is humid, overripe, stinking. Our dead-end jobs have cut us back to summer hours. Anyone with anywhere else to be is already there. Florida! Goddamn.