Andrew Sullivan - Waste

There would need to be some changes. She would have to learn to live by his rules again, the old rules that kept him safe, that kept money flowing into this city, even as Larkhill barked and gasped for more air, for more people, for something to sustain it. It lived on flesh. She would have to learn to be quieter, kinder, softer. Like him. Like him after they chopped and twisted and yanked his insides around one more time. To make sure everything would work for once.

Astor would ask her about that escalator. Once you start falling, it’s difficult to stop. Her face had got caught at the bottom, that’s what Condom said. Shredded her cheek on the way down. He would ask her about the baby. He would tell her about the lion, how all good things had to end. He would tell her about new things he wanted, new ways he was going to live. There would need to be a baby.

He would ask her why she fell down that escalator.

Astor Crane sat down on his heart-shaped bed and pressed play on the VCR. He watched a vicious nothing tear across the landscape, swallowing everything in its path. He waited for someone to cry out, but the sound was muted. He waited for the Brothers Vine to call.

He tried not to get sentimental about the lion.

Astor knew he needed something more than a pet. He wanted an heir. Something to replace whatever the doctors were scheduled to remove in the next few weeks.

Something wet and mewling. Something he could call his own.

Astor Crane didn’t want to die a scavenger, living off of someone else’s sons.

Mrs. Singh was alone. Her son now went to a boarding school in Toronto, his letters to her growing shorter and cruder with each passing month. Mainly they asked for money. When she called him in the late afternoon on weekends, she heard laughing and drinking and a boy named Henry offering to introduce all the guys to some real prime gash.

Gash. The way he said it made her spine crumple under her housecoat. It was always her son who hung up first, barely saying goodbye before the click. It was the click that made her wrench her hair and cry and watch Oprah with the volume up all the way, waiting for someone like her to appear on the screen, to tell everyone just how horrible that click was.

Her husband still worked long hours in the factory that made child car seats. Some nights when he got up early to deliver newspapers, his second job, Mrs. Singh dreamed of going home and holding her sister’s babies. She dreamed her father wasn’t drowned in three inches of water by the men he opposed on the zoning commission. She dreamed he was still alive, and he would see her on Oprah , and it was on Oprah where she could tell the world about that click. Oprah would probably clap and tell her to tell it like it is, tell it like it was, because Oprah knew the truth. She knew what it was to be lost and abandoned by husbands and children and the world at large. Mrs. Singh knew this.

And so every night, before she went to bed beside her husband who snored and never cleaned his beard after eating supper, she would sit in the kitchen and attempt to write Oprah letters. Letters about her son and the click and the smell of another woman on her husband’s breath. She couldn’t prove it, but maybe Oprah could, and all she was asking for was some guidance. All she was asking for was some help from America’s number-one talk show host, who never felt ashamed to cry in front of millions on the television screen.

Mrs. Singh wished she was so brave.

She was writing another letter to Oprah about the hopes she had for her new garden in the summer when she heard shouts and stomping boots from next door. She knew her neighbors, with their bulging golden muscles and breastless daughters, were not home. They had left for Columbus on Thursday. But there were sounds coming from their house, maybe raccoons inside the walls. Another shout rattled her writing hand, and Mrs. Singh pulled on her coat.

She did not bother knocking. There was no door, just shattered splinters in the frame. The floor was covered in bleach, and someone had piled all the bodybuilding costumes in the middle of the living room, dousing them in condiments from the refrigerator. Ketchup and pickle brine filled Mrs. Singh’s nose as she avoided the puddles of bleach eating through the stain on the wood floor. Someone had torn down all the fire alarms and lined the batteries up like soldiers on the windowsill. Detergent mottled the purple curtains and mustard spelled out MURDERERS across the buzzing static of the television set.

Mrs. Singh told herself to leave, told herself it was the smart thing to do, the right thing to do. All she needed to do was turn around and step out into the cold air. Instead, her legs began to move towards the stairs and the loud noises coming from above— the noises that had drawn Hitler’s moustache on photos of dogs and family members without discrimination.

Mrs. Singh sidled up to a bedroom door and peered inside. Three boys with shaved heads and boots too big for their feet sat on pink twin beds, each sipping from bottles held in bandaged hands. One of them had a patch of gauze affixed to his left temple. The boys swigged from their bottles, but their faces twisted with every sip. They were just boys.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The one with the gauze on his head belched and laughed when he saw her.

“What the fuck, is it cleaning day already?”

Another of the boys stood up.

“This bitch. I do remember you. You called them, right?”

“I have already called the police. And I will do it again,” Mrs. Singh said. This was the voice she had used on her son when he was little and afraid of the moon.

“Yeah, that’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s what she did last time. You’re why we moved.”

The boy was in front of her now, his shoulders rising and falling and the smell of alcohol on his breath, the same smell she swore filtered through the phone lines from her own son’s distant bedroom. This boy in front of her was just another Henry, another corrupter offering his unsavory wares to her impressionable son. All three of them were Henrys.

“You must leave now. I have already called the police.”

It was the boy with the bleeding skull and the veiny hands who punched her nose. She felt the bones collapse inward. The pain blinded her eyes. The boy’s fists did not stop. Mrs. Singh tried to defend herself but the blows broke down her arms and she could no longer speak through the loose teeth rolling over her tongue. His hands were hard and bony and she heard them pop and crackle against the soft, wrinkled skin of her face, her chest, her veined thighs.

“Logan! Loogie! Get off!”

On the floor, Mrs. Singh remembered when Oprah had wheeled out her cart of fat for the whole world to see. Oprah dividing herself, breaking her body down into separate selves. Mrs. Singh imagined herself now like that fat, beyond the realms of pain. She watched that old reel of the fabulous man in all his bright clothes, his blazer and his sagging skeleton telling Oprah he would die, he would die, because we all die, and Mrs. Singh had watched that at home and cried for the man who would die. Liberace. That was his name. She cried for him because he wore such beautiful clothes, and because he knew he would die. She saw the knowledge he carried with him that day in her living room, whispering the truth in front of millions.

“Logan, Logan, get off, you stupid…look at her face. Look at her, fucking hell. You gotta finish it now. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”

Mrs. Singh was fading. The click on the other end of the line rumbled toward her ruptured eardrum. She watched one boy toss the other aside, looked at his eyes. They were looking right at her but she didn’t remember them, she didn’t remember his voice or his name and then she saw him raise a heavy boot above her face.