Andrew Sullivan - Waste

Eventually the postcards began to change. Buildings in sepia tones with Greetings from Arizona in the corner. Ghost towns and cowboy statues with busted trigger fingers. Lines and lines of houses, a blueprint repeated across the flattened land of suburban Arizona. Moses began to keep the postcards in an envelope, where they remained unread and dormant in his room. He tucked it under his mattress even after they fled the old townhouse, the words remaining benign so long as they were quarantined in that manila envelope. He did not tell his mother.

“You actually live in this place?” Logan said. “No wonder you were never taking us back here. B. Rex always just said to let it go, but I was kind of sketched out. You never actually told us where you lived. This place is like a fucking disease.”

Logan was talking again. He’d talked the whole way over here. About the rise of illegal immigration in the city and the broken window theory and the ways you could tell the difference between a Muslim and Hindu Paki if you looked close enough. A lot of his theories had to do with pork consumption and going through their trash. Moses had jammed Texaco’s purple hat over Logan’s head to cover up the bleeding swastika before they left the butcher shop. Purple didn’t show the blood or the hate — just absorbed it. Swallowed it whole. They didn’t talk about Mr. Chatterton folded up in the bone can. They didn’t talk about Logan’s mother, either.

“Well, what did you expect?” Moses said.

“I don’t know. Maybe your mom was a spic or something? Fucking revelations happening all over the place today,” Logan said. “I guess none of this shit should surprise me. Did you hear they’re making another Terminator?”

Da Nasty on a Saturday was loud, so loud you felt it down in your gut, in the tiny hairs on your forearms. There were no vacancies. The hallway was littered with bottle caps and White Snake lyrics belted at the top of smokers’ lungs. The air conditioners huffed away at full capacity as the meth heads complained about stuffy eyes and phantom itches behind their ears. Someone blasted a porno at top volume with the door open, a woman loudly critiquing the performances of the men on screen. Too soft, she said. Too soft.

“ Terminator?”

“Yeah, like Part II,” Logan said.

The boys walked past Room 227 and the sound of power tools.

“Arnold can’t even speak fucking English.”

Moses’s room was at the end of the hall. He hoped Elvira would just stay in the bathroom tonight. He could play it off as some junkie hiding out in his room, or an old family friend who just needed a place to stay for a while. No, that was stupid. Fuck it. Logan could say whatever he wanted tonight. At least Moses had a parent around.

“One of your ultimate heroes, after your whole attempt at getting some retribution last night backfired all over your face at the Triple K, is a fucking immigrant in the real world.”

“Yeah, but he’s German…” Logan said.

“He’s fucking Austrian,” Moses said.

“I don’t care what country he is from. What you aren’t seeing here, Moses, is the fact that the American government is so corrupt now, it can’t see what’s coming,” Logan said. “Look, the American government won’t even admit how it’s playing into the hands of the blacks and the Jews and the — hey, I bet a fucking black dude created Skynet! Just wait for the fucking new movie. Shit, man, you see what I’m talking about? Fucking Skynet. Apocalyptic, four horseman shit. And Arnold, he’s the fucking white reckoning come to set the record straight.”

The Judge was alone on the bed, tucked in under the faded flower-print duvet. A thousand washes couldn’t get some of the stains out, only pushed them deeper into the fabric until they became a part of the pattern — irrecoverable evidence of someone else’s bad decisions. The door to the bathroom was open. Both taps on the sink ran hot and cold. Steam gathered under the fan. The bathtub was empty. The television was on, but the sound was muted and the whole room was too quiet. Bill Cosby waved at the two boys from behind the screen and smiled. Someone had left the door to the balcony open. Postcards spilled across the floor.

“What’s with the bowling ball, dude? You got some fetish you haven’t told me about?”

Elvira Moon was gone.

Alisha Wugg no longer wore any eye makeup.

“I don’t let her watch any TV,” she said. “I hope you know that.”

She still worked in the payroll office at the liquor warehouse, filing away the addresses of every creep who commented on her ass into a folder entitled “Eventualities Et Al.” Eventually one of them would have his foot run over by a thousand-pound fork lift, snapping all the toes off inside his steel-toed boot. Eventually one of them would come in drunk and puke all over the scanners before he was fired, losing his wife, house, and custody of three children in the process. Someday they would all disappear. She would shred their file page by page in the storage room with a smile on her face. All of this was eventual.

“Not even, like, Sesame Street?” Jamie said.

“Well, what is a Snuffleupagus anyway?” Alisha said.

“I think it’s a mammoth.”

Jamie Garrison sat across the table from her, his hands fidgeting in his lap. Kansas sat at the end of the table, dividing her peas into separate nations based on size and relative color. The small dark greens would soon outnumber all others, swelling like a tidal wave on one side of her plate.

“Not like an elephant? Or something?”

Alisha was already clearing the table, her thin hands flaking skin from too many showers and not enough soap. She didn’t paint her nails, afraid of the chips and flakes.

“Well, without the tusks,” Jamie said.

“So just a hairy elephant, and then they gave it a name. It doesn’t really make sense to me.”

“It’s a kids’ show, Alisha.”

Kansas nodded and began to eat her peas. She saved the vegetables for last.

“I know it’s a kids’ show, but if I can’t figure out what’s going on, then — well, I can barely afford the cable. Not that I’m saying — I have been getting your checks.”

The checks had been coming twice a month for the last year or so, ever since the night the television got cracked. She had a new box now, humming and spitting out large angry words about God in the living room. The house could get lonely without the noise. And Kansas only talked on her own schedule.

There were no neighbors out here, just old factories for J.P. Chemical and the Osprey Windshield system, discontinued in 1983 after Ford bought them out and closed the whole operation down. An old iron osprey still dangled from a weathervane on the roof with a salmon clutched in its rusted claws. A few miles down the road, the sprawling Larkhill Institute for Mental Health remained closed. Kids still broke in on summer weekends to drink beer and decipher old symbols carved into the walls with dirty fingernails and sharpened toothbrushes.

“You’ll keep getting them,” Jamie said. “I know what we agreed on.”

“And I’m not complaining. That’s why I wanted to have you come over again.”

The snow had stopped falling outside. Alisha washed the dishes at the sink. The dishwasher was still flooded, and after the plumber showed her an estimate a month ago, she’d kicked him out and screamed at him from the doorway. Something about cheats and liars and the comeuppance provided in the afterlife for every fraudster in his own boiling pot of regret. Something her mother would have said.

Sometimes Alisha would look in the mirror before the sun was up only to see her mother’s face, the long lines drawn around her mouth, like channels focusing the piercing file of her scream, magnifying its judgment until all you heard was someone slamming the door and the fact that it was your fault, it was always your fault, don’t you realize you broke me? Broke me like a fucking horse. Like a horse that should be put down. Just like you. A nothing.