Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

They only had one secret from Ellen: the whole heroin saga, the third plotline of that already-storied April day — Danny and Rachel both gone dark with stupidity, and Ellen in her blazing grief. “You know what I think?” Rachel said to Danny one time. “There’s nothing honorable about hurting someone you care about for no good reason. I think that the only way to make it up to her is to keep keeping the secret.” They never brought it up again, even to each other. What else was there to say?

Ellen specialized in contract law at BU. Danny designed websites. They had a son and named him Dylan and were doing well for themselves but had no love for Boston, so when an opportunity arose in Hong Kong she said she wanted to take it. They lived in a tower in the Central Mid-Levels and Ellen commuted to an office in Taikoo. They had been in Asia nearly three years and loved it, but were always eager for their old friends to come visit. Rachel, freshly divorced at thirty-one from a man named Rowan, was encouraged and cajoled and prodded and finally said yes. She would come for thirteen days — all her vacation time, but the flight was fifteen hours so it hardly seemed worth it to come for less.

(Percy had died several years earlier, thrown from a horse while on a weekend getaway with Kat’s successor. Kat herself still lived in Portland. She had a new set of friends, owned her apartment, sent e-cards on all their birthdays, but had basically written herself out of their lives.)

“I had the weirdest dream,” Ellen says on the morning of the day Rachel lands. “I dreamed I never got tired of experimental film. I was on the faculty at Hampshire. I had this big brass key that opened a room full of old projectors. Also, I’d never quit smoking.”

“I’m glad you quit smoking,” Danny says. Then, “Have you ever even been to Hampshire?”

“I’ve never even been to Amherst,” she says, laughing. They make love and then she has to get ready for work. She’d have liked to go with Danny to meet Rachel, but this whole week is going to be rough, in no small part because she’s taking several personal days next week: they’re going to show Rachel the city, do all that touristy stuff they’re always hearing about but never seem to get around to checking out.

If you asked her, Ellen would say it is a testament to her own superlative taste in people that Danny and Rachel had the strength to exhaust their sickness for each other, then recover to achieve the chaste, sibling-like love they were always meant to enjoy. If this is a partisan reading, let it slide. Few enough stories end well, and even this one is haunted by the specter of Rachel’s future, betrayed by but also bereft without that SOB Rowan. But that problem’s on ice back in America, so for now let us say things are going well enough.

They drop Rachel’s things at the apartment, then head right back out again: to Taikoo to meet Ellen for lunch. The trick is to stay busy so you stay awake. If you can make it through the first day, you’ll sleep hard that night, beat your jet lag. Dylan’s at kiddie gymnastics class with the live-in housekeeper, here called an amah, or helper. Ellen has to cut lunch short for a call. Danny and Rachel take the metro under the harbor to Kowloon, where they wander in and out of neighborhoods and markets until it gets dark. Ellen checks in via text every hour or so, but the upshot is she’s not getting out of there anytime soon. Dylan’s spent the whole day with the helper by this point, which Danny and Ellen agree is not to become a habit, but once in a blue moon like this won’t damage his psyche irreparably, and the truth is even if they haul ass they won’t make it home before bedtime. Danny could call the helper and tell her to keep Dylan up, but then they’ll all pay tomorrow. Forget it, Ellen texts him back; it’ll be fine this one time. He agrees, signs off xoxoxo, and turns to Rachel, who’s looking exhausted, so they head for the cross-harbor ferry, board, and find an empty bench on the upper deck where they sit, side by side, midway between two alien skylines on a small ship bobbing in the far-flung waves.

Twenty minutes max in the mushroom suit — that’s the official rule. But it’s still a smallish company and there are only two suits to share among twenty-one franchise locations, so there’s pressure to make the most of your turn while it lasts. When the thirtieth franchise opens — late next year, if you believe HQ’s projections — they say they’ll order a third suit, and at fifty a fourth one, which sounds good until you realize that the proportion of mushroom suits to restaurants is actually in decline. Anyway, our turn started this morning and Ethan, that savvy entrepreneur, is eager to leverage this brand-growth opportunity, never mind that it’s 95 degrees out with 100 percent humidity. He’s a real trouper, Ethan. Especially since it’s me in the suit and not him.

It’s hard to stand upright in the suit, much less walk in it. I had to be led out here and planted on the corner where I’m sure to be seen by traffic in all directions. My own view, meanwhile, is like peering through the hair catch in a shower drain. “Wave your hands,” Ethan advised me. “See if you can get people to honk.”

Well, plenty of them do honk, but not because I’m waving my hands. The suit doesn’t have hands. They’re honking because the suit is bruise-purple, furry, and mottled with yellow amoebic forms across a cap like a stoner’s idea of a wizard’s hat blown up to the size of a golf umbrella, though I prefer to think of myself as a huge diseased alien cock. When sweat gets in my eyes I can’t wipe them. The hair catch goes from HD to blurry. It’s not that big of a switch.

Different people respond to the suit in different ways. Children stroke the fur, tug the cap if they can reach it. Then they ask it for presents. Their moms don’t want them to touch it—“That’s dirty, sweetie,” they say, which is true, every square inch of it, inside and out — but they do want, inexplicably, for Junior to stand next to it—“Big smile now”—for a cell phone picture to text to Daddy, some guy in an office park scrolling through an emojis menu, looking for the one that says, Why is our son standing in the shadow of a huge bruised dick?

Frat boys throw a shoulder as they pass by, rarely bother to look back and witness my flailing attempts to stay on my feet. They know what flailing is; they’ve seen it. Their mandate is to induce, not to observe.

Bicyclists want me to get out of their way, which is not a realistic request given my ranges of speed and movement, but also, fuck them, they ought to be riding in the street. It’s not my fault that’s illegal in this backward-ass college town — though, having never ridden a bike myself, for all I know it’s a Florida-wide thing. Anyway they scream at me. I would lunge toward them if I could lunge at all.

Black teenage boys — now this is interesting — will cross the street to avoid me. They’ll sprint into traffic; I’ve seen it through the hair catch. And these are the same suave posses who practice their rhymes at full volume on the steps of the public library, who hit on girls from across the street. Now I’ll grant you, a guy wearing a full-body fur mushroom suit to promote an organic vegetarian pizza pub is arguably the whitest thing to have occurred in the history of whiteness, but it’s not as though it’s going to rub off on them. It’s not like it’s contagious, like breathing the air around me will result in sudden loss of pigmentation, cravings for old Friends episodes, and, I don’t know, a Dave Matthews box set. On the other hand, it’s only fair to admit that if such a disease existed, and if it were airborne (as indeed mushroom spores are), then I am exactly the person who would be carrying it — patient zero, Typhoid Whitey — so maybe they’re wise to play it safe.