Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

Del watched Randy gag on the cigarette in between hits off the oxygen mask. “Hey,” Del finally said, “remember that book I used to read all the time? Dorcie and Cole and…shit, I can’t remember the other one.”

“Holly,” Randy said. “Her name was Holly. She was practically a virgin.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Jesus, I can’t believe you remember her name.”

“Now, that Dorcie was something else,” Randy said. “God, I wish I’d met her when I was benching six hundred. I’d have tore that up.”

“Christ, Randy, it was just a book. I mean, those people weren’t real or anything.”

“Oh, no, you’re wrong, man,” Randy said. “They was real. More real than most shit anyway. I still think about her. What’s that tell you?”

“What about the old man then?” Del whispered, leaning in close to the bed. “Do you still think about him?”

“Jesus, Delbert, you act like that’s the only thing in your life that ever really happened. Fuck that old bastard. He got what he deserved, the way I see it.” Del stood up and began pacing around the room. “Hey, while you’re up, hand me that magazine there,” Randy said. Del glanced around, saw an old copy of Ohio Bodybuilder on the windowsill. There was a picture of Randy on the cover. Del looked at his cousin in the faded photo, the victory smile, veins popping out everywhere. He handed over the magazine just as Randy took another hit off the cigarette and started coughing. It sounded as if someone was busting his chest apart with a jackhammer. He dropped the cigarette on the bed next to the oxygen mask. A small fire erupted in the sheets. When Del grabbed the water pitcher, Randy waved him away. “Get the fuck out of here,” he gasped. As Del hurried out the door, he turned back to see Randy ripping up the magazine and feeding photos of his glory days to the flames.

—

Del had the feeling that he’d go on forever, which is a great feeling really, especially after you’ve watched your cousin commit suicide with a Marlboro. When the Fish Stick Girl finished her acrobatics and slid down the pole out of breath, he pushed her down on her knees behind the restroom door. “Act like you’re doing this for money,” he said urgently, unzipping his pants.

“Here?”

“Why not?” Del said. “This place is dead tonight.”

“How much money?” she asked, settling back on her heels.

“I don’t know. Enough to buy a hot dog.”

“A hot dog?”

“Not much, just some change,” Del answered, placing his hands on her wet hair. He closed his eyes and began to hear the ocean off the Florida coast in the dryer’s muffled rumblings. Inhaling the dank laundry smells, he thought of Leo’s mildewed carpet. He pictured the lamp in his sweaty hands, felt the weight of it, saw the seagulls make another pass around the shade. The Fish Stick Girl kept banging her face into his groin, and for a moment Del was fifteen again. He was on a Greyhound going south and reading that section in Reds where Dorcie fires up barbiturates for the first time. Randy was sitting beside him squeezing his pecs together and urging him to jump ahead to the chapter about the black guy named King Coon who knocked the white girls up with his thumb. Then they were laughing, pointing their own thumbs at some blond woman seated across the aisle. When Del realized it was over, he looked down and saw the Fish Stick Girl smiling up at him. He’d forgotten all about her.

After he folded his clean black jeans, Del and the Fish Stick Girl left the Suds and headed up the street. It was one o’clock in the morning and the air was cool and damp with dew. “Boy, you sure get into it,” the Fish Stick Girl said. “What was so funny?”

“I think I saw my cousin.”

“Nobody ever told me that before,” she said. “Have you been taking my meds again?”

“Well, I appreciate it anyway,” he said.

“You’re welcome. Now you do something for me,” she said, opening up her purse.

“What’s that?”

“Here,” she said, shoving a fish stick in Del’s face.

Del hesitated, then grabbed the fish stick and bit a cold chunk off one end. It didn’t taste like fish at all, but he imagined it was something else anyway, the way the devout do with the little wafer and the grape juice. “Okay, now close your eyes,” she said. Del shut his eyes. “Don’t peek,” she ordered. As she pulled him down the street, he pretended not to know where they were going. She liked that. Cracking his eyes open, Del saw thick black clouds move across the sky and cover the moon like a grave blanket. He closed his eyes again and crammed the rest of the fish stick into his mouth. Suddenly, he was very tired. He felt like the ragged ghoul staggering across the screen in an old movie, the peace he sought always out of reach. They walked on, the Fish Stick Girl leading him by the hand.

Once, for about a month or two, I decided I was going to be a different kind of guy. Muscley. Not always thinking so much. My body was going to be a temple, not a dive bar. The kitchen made me smoothies, raw eggs blended with kale and wheat germ and bee pollen. That sort of thing. I stopped drinking, flushed all of Darius’s goodies down the toilet. I was civil to my Face. I went running. I read the books, did the homework my tutor assigned. I was a model son, a good brother. The Olds didn’t know what to think.

Hero, of course, knew something was up. Hero always knew. Maybe she saw the way I watched her Face when there was an event and we all had to do the public thing.

Meanwhile I could see the way that Hero’s Face looked at my Face. There was no way this was going to end well. So I gave up on raw eggs and virtue and love. Fell right back into the old life, the high life, the good, sweet, sour, rotten old life. Was it much of a life? It had its moments.

“Oh, shit,” Hero says. “I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. Help me, . Help me, please?”

She drops the snake. I step hard on its head. Nobody here is having a good night.

“You have to give me the code,” I say. “Give me the code and I’ll go get help.”

She bends over and pukes stale champagne on my shoes. There are two drops of blood on her arm. “It hurts,” she says. “It hurts really bad!”

“Give me the code, Hero.”

She cries for a while, and then she stops. She won’t say anything. She just sits and rocks. I stroke her hair, and ask her for the code. When she doesn’t give it to me, I go over and start trying numbers. I try her birthday, then mine. I try a lot of numbers. None of them work.

—

I chased the same route every day for that month. Down through the woods at the back of the main guesthouse, into the Valley of the Girls just as the sun was coming up. That’s how you ought to see the pyramids, you know. With the sun coming up. I liked to take a piss at the foot of Alicia’s pyramid. Later on I told Alicia I pissed on her pyramid. “Marking your territory, ?” she said. She ran her fingers through my hair.

—

I don’t love Alicia. I don’t hate Alicia. Her Face has this plush, red mouth. Once I put a finger up against her lips, just to see how they felt. You’re not supposed to mess with people’s Faces, but everybody I know does it. What’s the Face going to do? Quit?

But Alicia has better legs. Longer, rounder, the kind you want to die between. I wish she were here right now. The sun is up, but it isn’t going to shine on me for a long time. We’re down here in the cold, and Hero isn’t speaking to me.

What is it with rich girls and pyramids, anyway?

—

In hieroglyphs, you put the names of the important people, kings and queens and gods, in a cartouche. Like this.