Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

Is it any wonder we’re going feral?

Andrea is downing a shot of Absolut and I am telling her about Brendan. She puts the empty glass down, goes, “I fucking love skaters, why are they all so fucking hot?” and opens the front door. Porch light spills in. She becomes obscure in a personal cloudbank of Marlboro exhaust. I follow her. “Remember Brian Lumes?” she says, speaking of skaters.

I set us up with a couple more shots.

“And he had that fucking haircut,” she says. “The weird long front lock that went down his face and it was like his head was melting.” And we used to make so much fun of him but he didn’t care because he was probably fucked up on ecstasy or else just stoned.

Andrea takes her shot. I take mine. I guess she got out of whatever it was that Will suspected, or maybe that was just some wild shit he said when they were in a fight about something else. Probably he thinks his girl would never cheat on him, but that it still makes sense for him to call her a whore.

Will:

It’s better when she’s in a fight with him. She comes over alone and gives me her full attention. I hate Will, obviously, because he has her and because sometimes he hurts her, but he’s good to keep at a distance because he can always get the best drugs and because he has her. She doesn’t love him but won’t consider leaving, so what’s the point of fighting him or something? I like to think I could save her if she’d let me but Will and I are her two worlds and she mostly keeps us apart. I don’t even know if she likes him. I try to imagine them sitting on a loveseat, wearing their socks but not their shoes, watching a sitcom, twirling angel hair pasta up from blue bowls, and my mind goes to static, a bright blank seething wall.

We weren’t always like this, but whatever we used to be is hard to focus on from where I’m standing, like trying to imagine what the last guy who checked out the Conrad book was thinking or the credit card guy’s eyes getting stung shut by sweat so he doesn’t get a decent enough look at me to hail a cop and report the stolen radio. It may even be somehow that whatever Will does to her makes her want what she wants with me — a thought I can hardly stomach. What she and I have is a trust thing, roughly.

Andrea and I are in facing chairs, holding ashtrays, and for a weird minute I start wishing she weren’t here so I could be reading or on the net trying to score more photos (because I think there are secrets to be learned, and that I can learn them, even if the secrets don’t want to be learned, and I love to learn secrets and then own the truth) but then my attention snaps back either to whatever Andrea’s saying or to the shooting-star tattoos. One per hip. Andrea swears the left one is a little fucked up because the tattoo guy did it second and by that time the Vicodin Will gave her had worn off so she was flinching. This is bullshit because Andrea doesn’t flinch. Period. Do anything. And besides, I don’t see the flaw. I see twin comets, dive-bombing like predatory birds past the waterline at the rim of her tight low-rise black jeans, the arc of the stars’ descent such that if her body is the universe the galaxial collision must blaze in the far astral reach of her hidden cunt.

Across the street, through a window with a gauzy curtain, I see the silhouettes of some couple lost in whatever makes them unique to each other. Andrea gives voice to her boredom. There is noise like a party coming from the other direction. We decide to go and see.

Getting lucky:

Kids smoke cigarettes and dope. It’s a little apartment building that started life as a large house. My friend Melissa lives on the bottom right. Somebody’s big brother or sister must live here. I take Andrea’s hand just because I want to; because I just want to. I say something about keeping her close to me, not losing her in the crowd, which she ignores. And pulls her hand free. A boy in a shadow says something about her being sexy and I turn toward him and he turns away.

Brendan’s with some friends. A tall, unattractive girl in an expensive black miniskirt and red bra hurtles down the stairs, barely keeping upright, screaming the name of a person she needs to fucking talk to right-a-fucking-way. The disinterested skaters on the lawn tell her that guy ain’t here, and to lift her skirt up. Negotiations begin. Soon a tall kid, mildly Hispanic, has the shirtless girl pinned on the grass, off to a side. Brendan is a particular kind of embodied dream, hitching his pants up and sidling toward us, mumbling something like “Hey, it’s the guy that cuts the meat yeah hey” and puts out a hand that I slap five. The crack of palm on palm reverberates in my head. Keep it together, hold your shit.

“Lame party,” I say.

Brendan: “Huh?” From closer up, he’s clearly zoned.

“Come with us to my place,” I say. “It’s just over there,” and I point around the corner. “We’ll, uh, chill out or whatever.” Brendan looks across his scatter of friends, some of them drinking bottles of domestic beer, others presumably loaded some other way.

“Well,” he says evasively, but comes. Bops his head a little, hearing some dumb internal music we probably wouldn’t be into. I let go of Andrea. Nobody talks. We round the corner.

One time:

I’m reading Story at the sandwich shop on my break and sort of watching Brendan in the background. I’m underlining something (these orgasms were as different from normal climaxes as, say, the mirth of savage Africans from that of Occidentals) but then it gets busy and I’m back on the clock, so I grab a packet of sugar from a little dish of them and stick it in the book for a bookmark, and then later, I’m reading to Andrea (It is not astonishing that the bleakest and most leprous aspects of a dream are merely an urging) and I get this idea about if we could be sweet for a change so I tell her I’m going to sugar her cunt down and lick it clean. I pour out the contents of the packet and lean in. For a moment I’m consumed by the genius conflict of her salts with the sweetness, but then a foul taste takes over and I gag badly. I choke. She props herself up on an elbow, nipples wilting, and reads the torn empty packet: “You asshole,” she says. “The pink ones aren’t sugar they’re Sweet’N Low.”

We get to my place. I run in to use the bathroom but stop to put on CNN real quick. Footage of congressmen. But they’re not showing the pictures. I have all the pictures, I don’t need them to be broadcast in order to see them, but it makes me feel better to see them on TV. Even though the good parts are blurred out. Somehow, the broadcast makes everything okay. Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, I think to myself. Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee. I don’t need the TV to tell me the list. I have memorized the list. I have collected all the photos. I shut the TV off.

Or:

On a different day if I’m by myself, I might take the Bataille and Conrad books and put them side by side, maybe break the two spines trying to make their words merge — but they won’t. You can get drunker, push harder — they just dry rub. So you turn back to that desert that is offered to you, glowing.

I think of the cool hum-whine of the meat slicer and of the similar noise my computer makes. Pictures only show you. They don’t let you feel it. And I feel it. Or want to how badly?

These are glimpses of what I’m thinking about as I light another cigarette off Andrea’s, offer one to Brendan, which he accepts, dodge the dirty look she gives me. We sip strong gin and tonics. Andrea and I are both curious to see what Brendan is capable of. I know she likes the idea of Brendan. And the physique. She’s probably wondering if he’ll let us hit him.