Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

Scott names the couple Nate and Jennifer. She’s Korean American, born here to immigrant parents, grew up in Foster City. Nate’s from Ohio, near Schmall, the town that shares its name with the private college where Scott and Ellen met. Surely Nate didn’t attend Schmall, but he probably went to the parties. Maybe he and Scott waited in line for a keg together, made eyes at the same wobbling girl. Maybe Nate even hooked up with Ellen. All the college girls went through a townie phase. Sometimes, when Nate is making his regular love to Jennifer, with her smooth skin and soft belly and perfectly black hair, his mind wanders back to the old days, when a random Thursday night might have delivered him a freckled brunette in a scoop-necked shirt to make love to — where? In somebody’s upstairs bathroom or on a back deck, his own childhood bed or Ellen’s dorm bed, the woods behind a tumbledown barn.

Scott writes a check for three thousand dollars, leaves the “to” line blank, and folds it into his wallet. If he is ever stopped on the street by the dog’s original owners, he will look them in the eye, tell them the plain truth, and offer the check. He will put his palms up and let the leash go free. It will be their choice: the dog or the money. And no matter what happens next, he will at least know Yreka’s true name.

Scott and Yreka stop by the coffee shop on their way to Dolores Park, where people lay out blankets on the sunward slope of the great green hill. Olivia gives him a free coffee and a quick kiss on the mouth, then kneels down to ruff up Yreka’s fur and kiss her on her cold black nose. She says that she’ll be off in an hour and will meet up with them. She disappears into the employee restroom to wash her hands before she makes another drink.

At the vet’s office, Scott writes on the form that Yreka is a recent adoptee, that he found her wandering with no collar on Jack Kerouac Alley next to City Lights and brought her home. The vet is happy to report that Yreka is worm free. Also, she’s pregnant. He gives Scott a brochure about what to expect. When Scott gets home, he gives Yreka two extra Beggin’ Strips, fishes the unaddressed check from his wallet, and tears it in half. He halves the halves, then repeats this procedure until tiny pale-blue squares burst from his fingers like confetti.

When Scott first got to town, and even after he decided to stay, he held off on getting in touch with any of his contacts in the music scene. But now that he’s ready to play shows again it only takes a couple of emails to line up a gig. He’s got his headphones plugged into his laptop and his iTunes on shuffle while Yreka snoozes on the couch beside him. He strokes her blond zeppelin belly with one hand while cruising Facebook with the other. He one-hand-types Ellen’s full name into the search bar, and when her profile pops up he is astonished to see that she never unfriended him.

Probably she forgot, is all, or else the thought never crossed her mind. Ellen was always an intermittent Facebooker. She isn’t one of those people who feel the need to broadcast all the excruciating minutiae of their lives. He reads through her old updates, starting with the day after he left and working his way back to the present. There’s not much there: a handful of promo posts for the film festival in the weeks leading up to it, a couple of embedded music videos, a link to a Times op-ed about peak oil, a little gallery of photographs from the festival’s after-party. He lingers on a snapshot of Ellen, drink-flushed and grinning, her arm around a bemused-looking Gus Van Sant. Her most recent status update is from last week, and all it says is “Fffrrryyydddaaayyy.” Five people “like” this — Percy Tomlinson, Kat Stokes, Rachel Duncan, Ellen’s great-aunt Marlene, and Danny Kramer, the guy who sent Scott the text message warning him never to even think Ellen’s name ever again. Scott clicks on Danny’s name and is unsurprised to see that Danny did unfriend him, which means the only parts of Danny’s profile he can see are those few tidbits that he leaves public:

Danny Kramer

Networks: Schmall College; Edgewater High School,

Orlando, FL

Music: Rilo Kiley, Wilco, Weezer (only Pinkerton —obvs), Neutral Milk Hotel, Mountain Goats, Hank Williams, Velvet Underground

Employers: Not if I can help it.

Danny’s profile picture is a close-up of him and Ellen in a staring contest, eyes wide open and nose tips touching, in what Scott believes to be the master bedroom of the house he fled.

Scott’s DJ set is totally killer and he knows it. Sweat streaming down his bald head, the firm clamp of the headphones over his ears — he’s entering that zone where he’s both more and less himself than any other time: he is everyone dancing in the whole hot venue, and he’s the huge amps hung on shining chains from the black ceiling, and he’s the thunder being flung from the amps’ blind mesh faces. He’s all of it at once but also none of it — beautifully, perfectly, inexhaustibly nothing at all.

Olivia comes over to him while he’s packing up, a rocks glass in each hand.

“Nice set,” she says, grinning. She nods at his equipment case. “Nice gear, too.”

“Medical grade,” he says, giving her the same nod back. “One of those for me?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Oh, I’ll let you know,” she says, and then they’re both laughing. Then they’ve finished their Jamesons, and he’s loading his gear into his trunk while she orders them another round. When the next DJ goes on, Scott pulls Olivia out onto the dance floor. The whole rest of the perfect night the lightning of success is wild in him — through the next set and last call and the smeary, invincible drunk drive home. Then they’re somehow in his room, and here’s his tall girlfriend on her naked knees as he explodes across her tits and chin.

They lie on their backs, breathing deep and slow in the hot dark. Scott realizes that the universe is ungoverned: there is no law for him to be an outlaw from. He says to Olivia that he’s going to take the dog out for a walk. She tells him not to be long. He throws on the shirt that he was wearing earlier and a pair of jeans without underwear. He enters the living room on watery legs and flips the light on. Yreka, surprised by the sudden burst of light, whimpers pitifully but does not pause in her effort to eat her newest whelp free from its amniotic sac. If she doesn’t hurry, it will drown in there, and the next one is already on its way — a shiny purple oval like an enormous cold-medicine capsule or a small translucent dinosaur egg inching out of her distended vulva. The couch, of course, is ruined. Inside the emergent sac is something like a bald rabbit trapped in gelatin: squirming, blind, awake.

Olivia, naked in the bedroom doorway, draws a sharp breath when she sees why Scott is frozen. She sidles up behind him, her belly against his back, and slides her arms around his waist — thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans. Yreka licks her chops, then grabs her youngest pup by the scruff. She plunks it over by its brothers and sisters, four — now five — wrinkled pink things mewling in residual slime. By the time it’s over, Yreka has whelped nine puppies. Scott knows from the brochure to expect to lose a few of these, but there’s no apparent runt, and by the evening of the next day it’s clear that the whole litter will survive. Life becomes a blur of tiny bodies in harmless ceaseless collision. Mouths yip and teeth nip and new claws emerge and scratch. The living room is transformed into a nursery, and the whole apartment stinks of shit and newspapers. Yreka’s teats bleed from the rough, unending attention: her blond muzzle shows its first threads of white, tired pride now inscribed in her watery wise brown eyes. Scott loves the puppies but doesn’t know how he would have managed without Olivia. She’s over at his place so often he winds up making her a key.