Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

“We can pretend we don’t know each other.”

“We’re cuter than most of the girls on the site.”

“Girls next door. He can say he met us next door.”

Arlo had met Mindal on a line in Moab, while I was still hovering one foot off the ground at Indoor Boulders. Now we midlined, sometimes high. Arlo’s sister grew medicinal strains up north, but Arlo had decided to be the sober child of addicts, so Mindal and I passed a joint in her car.

“He’s pretty judgy about drugs,” I said.

“He lets us use his bathroom. And his stove. He builds perfect anchors.”

“But we buy all the food.”

“It’s just until we make enough to line without him. Let’s just fucking kiss, okay? We know we’re not gay. Who cares what the internet thinks?”

“I could go back to the law office.”

“The real estate guy? He evicts people for money. Marx says landlords are the scum of the earth.”

“Get the Manifesto. I want to see where he says that.”

“It’s in Das Kapital, ” she said. “Rent is bullshit.”

Owning a van was not bullshit. Nobody could evict you from a van, though they could snatch it if you went bankrupt. A van could break down. There was more to understand about vans than I was prepared to learn. I could type quickly and edit Arlocumsalot’s About Me (“I am a 19-year-old male who luvsloves slacklining and pleasuring himself”). I could proofread the van repair manual, but I could not repair. Sex work required a willingness I thought I might have if I didn’t have parents. My mother watched one hour of television a week. She gave hugs freely and wasn’t addicted to anything except Midol.

“This is a class issue,” I said.

“Just because his parents were coke dealers doesn’t make him a different class. Coke is expensive.”

“His father went to jail. Your father is a podiatrist.”

“It’s a fine line. Don’t you want to get out of society? We hate society. We’ve always hated it, ever since that idiot homeroom teacher made us turn our Pro-Choice T-shirts inside out.”

“We shouldn’t have listened. We had the First Amendment on our side.”

“That’s one of the only decent laws,” she admitted. She buried the roach in a mint tin. “But it doesn’t matter. The law is worthless. We have to leave society.”

“We’re still in society.” I looked across the street. The hotel pool shimmered. Maybe we could sleep in the hotel. My mother would pay. I’d tell her it was an emergency, that we had almost been sex trafficked. In the morning, Mindal could drive me back to the city, where I would resume typing 3-Day Notices to irresponsible tenants. The lawyer didn’t require loyalty, only a willingness to never stop typing. He and I had the same birthday. It created a bond that allowed me to quit for weeks at a time as long I continued to forward him our shared horoscope.

“The risks you take today will reap great rewards.”

For him that probably meant trying a new Turkish restaurant. For me it meant showing my nipples to agoraphobes who preferred watching tit in real time. I put on my camouflage bikini top. We had found the bikinis in a thrift store on our drive north from the Bay. Mindal wore hers with a matching camo bandanna when we went grocery shopping, endured catcalls telling her it wasn’t hunting season yet.

She took off her shirt and opened the car door.

“Where’s your bikini?” I said. I had counted on her being scared of the cam so I could be the one to say it was okay to be scared.

“I’m going topless tonight,” she said. “We need to make some money.”

We’d make porn, not war. There were new wars, a lot like the old wars. Arlo was the right age to enlist. If Mindal fucked him, did I get to keep any of the money? What could I do on camera, stand there explaining local rent regulations, how to outsmart your landlord? Braid Mindal’s hair?

Arlo told Mindal to put her shirt back on.

“It has to be a show. We show a little, the tips give. We show a little more, they give more. Have you ever been to a strip club?”

“Once,” she said.

“But it was really a pizza place,” I said. “We just had to walk through the stripping part to use the bathroom.”

She made a face she had refined over years of friendship, the “Stop talking you’re ruining it for me” face. It always meant I would keep talking for at least ten more minutes. I needed to be interrupted to stop, maybe even asked to leave.

“Can you go back to the car to get the blueberries?” she said. “We’re out in here.”

Now they were a we. She was going to sleep with him, and a shared hatred of cock blocking that rivaled our hatred of U.S. foreign policy dictated that I should let her. We had once been virgins for too long. That was why we lined, so she could sleep with good-looking morons. Mindal insisted on the ways they were smart. They could fix their vans when the vans broke down. They could place gear. But they didn’t understand her. Or maybe I didn’t understand her. Nobody had infused me with natural antidepressants as a child. Back at the car, I looked for the berries, looked at the pool. I already had on a bikini. We could sneak in later to swim, maybe after we’d filmed ourselves singing folk songs. I suspected I could talk her down to folk songs.

“We’re going to make a movie,” I said, returning myself to the we fold. “This van is our trailer.”

“Yeah!” said Arlo. “I like to think of myself as a director.”

“We’ll make it like a seventies porno!” said Mindal.

“That was a good decade,” I told Arlo. “We were born.”

Mindal made her “Stop talking about how old we are” face. I made my “Too late you shouldn’t have brought up the seventies” face.

“Mature women are hot,” he said.

“We know more about how to please men and ourselves,” I said.

“Young girls, they don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “That’s why I don’t sleep with too many of them.”

“Do you like girls or boys better?”

I had a new hunch about Arlocumsalot. It was actually an old hunch, a new idea to say something about it.

“Some of the tips get this notion about me that I must be gay because I don’t sleep with too many girls.”

“And you show them your cock every night,” said Mindal. “That might be swaying their opinion.”

“Yeah, but the audience is diverse,” he said. “I’m sure some of them want to see me with a woman. And an older woman would be great.”

“But do you like women?” I said. “Or would it just be to get more tips?”

“I like you two,” he said. Arlo sat back on a couch that had seen a lot of cum. He patted either side of himself. Neither of us moved. We made the same face.

—

AT THE LAWYER’S a week later, I got an email.

“Arl took mescaline, freaked out. Very bad. Call when L is at lunch.”

L was our code for lawyer.

“I thought Arlo was sober,” I typed back. “L doesn’t take a lunch.”

L was the last of the Dictaphone generation, or was at least trying to prolong the idea of that generation. He was young enough that he could have learned how to use a computer, and other lawyers found it confusing that he signed every email “Very Truly Yours.” The signoff had become a joke between me and L’s evening typist, Gray, whose suicide note I’d found open on the screen the day I started the job. Gray stuck around, though, long enough to make edits to his suicide note (it was a living document), and to begin flirting with me using the Very Truly Yours signoff for our intraoffice memos. He had a second job shouting landmarks at tourists from the top of a bus, and a third job tending to a girlfriend who seemed to dress exclusively in period costume. He had typed for L the entire time I was road tripping with Mindal and he was ready to kill me.