Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

For a second, Emerson keeps smiling but doesn’t say anything, a red mottling appears in his skin (she feels sorry for him, he’s such a transparent, white-guy color). “I forgot I didn’t tell you yet.” He falls back to keep pace beside her. “I always feel like all of us from the House already know about each other.” He doesn’t seem to be willing to look at her now; instead he’s fixed on the sidewalk. He smiles again, more intensely, and Felice realizes that at least some of the smiling is nerves and she softens toward him a bit. “I–I’m in training,” he says in a lowered voice. “I’m going to enter strongman competitions.”

“You what now?”

“They’re these big contests — of strength. It’s always on TV — like a sporting event. You can make a lot of money if you get known. Caber toss, stone put? Started with the Scots. The Highland games?”

Felice slants a frowning glance at him.

“These days there’s usually a truck pull and a tire flip.”

Now, with her board rumbling easily along the cement, Felice gives him a long, frank look. “Are you kidding? You mean, like, those guys who drag around tree trunks and junk? That stuff?”

They pass two girls and a Pomeranian jittering like a windup toy. “I’m not saying I’m gonna walk right out there and pick up trophies. I know I don’t have the muscle mass yet. But I’m close. Training hard, almost every day. I jog and walk the boardwalk twice a day.”

“And I thought you’d followed me here,” she says, joking yet privately disappointed.

“They let me into the Gold’s on Fourteenth. Herman and Ileana — they’re trainers there. They’ve been helping me out. They say I’ve got natural explosive power. We’re keeping it totally pure — no juicing, no additives. I’m working out three, four hours a day — arms, back, grip strength, everything. The manager said if I pick up a trophy at the regionals this spring he’ll sponsor me. He says I could go national.”

Felice closes her eyes, just enjoying hearing about the future. It’s not like the kind of dreaming all those waste products at the House or the yuppie losers out on Cocowalk are always doing — fame and money — everyone hanging around at Mansion or Nikki Beach or Crobar, like dancing and shit was going to transform them into Paris or Lindsay or Britney. Famous girls were always hanging around, wearing their fedoras, giggling in a knot of stoned celebutante friends, kids waving cell cameras at them, so you felt like you really were one of them already. Except the truly famous girls stuck to the clubs’ VIP lounges and woke up in their suites at the Delano, and the beach kids woke up back on the sand or even worse places than that.

Felice quits kicking, lets her board slow, and closes her eyes again. Daring herself, she keeps them closed and lifts one hand; her fingers pat a series of curling palm fronds — tap, tap, tap, tap. She lets the board roll to a stop, cants back her head, evaluating him through lowered lids. “Prove it.”

“Prove it what? You mean, like what—”

“That you’re all strong, like you say.”

He lifts and drops his hands: Felice notes the way his shoulders flare behind his shirt. “I could take you to the gym…”

She presses her lips together skeptically and kicks off on her board again. “Ever you say, Chief.” They pass a bank of police cars parked half on the curb. Cops standing around in tight black uniforms, hands on their hips, narrowly eyeing Emerson and Felice. Once they’re well down the block, she tosses her head so her hair flips across her back. “No, fuck the gym. You strong guys supposedly drag anchors and crap around, right? Can’t you, like, break a branch in half with your bare hands or something?”

“Depends on the branch.”

“Okay.” She jumps off her board abruptly and stomps the end, flipping it into her hand. “So go pick up that car over there, how about?” She gestures to a Hummer that looks like it’s been dipped in black lacquer.

“ That car? It weighs like five tons,” Emerson says. “Plus it’ll totally have a car alarm.” He gazes at her, her haughty chin. “Wait.” He heads toward the line of parallel parked cars and picks a rusting lime-green Impala convertible. “All right,” he says grimly. He stands in front of the car, rubs his hands together, huffing a little as if hyperventilating, and drops into a squat. “All right, all right,” he mutters.

Felice watches in silence as Emerson bends and the big muscles in his back fan out, and she sees — even before he’s fully gripped the car — that he really can do it, and then he’s lifting the front end of the car, one, two feet off the ground, up, holding it in place, then he or the car is making a deep, shuddering moan, lowering quickly. He lets go and the car falls, its frame bouncing with a crash. He turns, his face red. “Okay?” Then, gasping, “That — right there — called a power clean.”

Felice wasn’t aware of her hand drifting to her mouth, a flash of adrenaline.

He recovers sufficiently to smile, his face red. “You see that? Now you know. If that car there ran over you, I could save you. Nobody else could do that.”

Felice thinks of saying, Yeah, as long as it wasn’t a Hummer. Instead she nods. “Yeah, I guess.”

HE LIKES TO TALK this Emerson, unlike pretty much any boy she’s ever met. The punks and skinheads Emerson hangs out with get drunk and loud, their shouting and cursing like smashing windows. Emerson talks like a boy who’s been stranded in his thoughts — coherent yet odd, twisted into abstract designs.

“Just, the way I look at it is I think the mind is like a muscle, too,” he’s saying, ducking under the crimson spray of a bottlebrush tree. They circle an elderly couple, shuffling, facing the ground, hand in hand. “You just got to train it — like any other part of your body. I mean, like, you have to, if you ever want the other muscles to respond.”

“You mean, like—” Felice scowls at the sidewalk. Somehow Emerson got her to get off her board and go on foot — her least favorite form of locomotion. She won’t let him carry her board. “Like, your actual brain is a muscle? Can you move it?”

Emerson stops on the sidewalk, then starts again. “I like that. I don’t know the answer, but I like the idea of it. Moving your brain. But no, I mean, more like, the mind, consciousness, thought.”

“How could thoughts be a muscle ?”

He slides his hands into his pockets. “I know, but they are. And also, your muscles are a mind. Muscles feel stuff and think stuff and sense, all of that, and they, like communicate with the main mind and tell it stuff. So everything in you, every part of you is mind in the end.”

“And your mind is a muscle,” she repeats in a low inflection, not quite a question.

“That’s right.”

She glances uncertainly at Emerson’s smiling, preoccupied profile. Felice can’t tell if he’s a little bit scary and mental, or maybe a lot smarter than she’d thought. Back at the House, she’d seen him roaring with his stupid friends, ripping open beers and smashing cans on his head. “Where do you get this crap?” She is carefully dismissive.

He shrugs. “Everywhere. All that lifting gives you time to think about how things work. That’s when I do my best thinking. Picking up heavy stuff and putting it back down again? After a while it’s boring.”

Felice and Emerson enter the busier commercial area of South Beach: passing rows of pastel apartment buildings, hotels like old toys, glimpses of azure ocean floating in the distance, the sidewalk filled with tourists. Doddering elderly, like shipwreck survivors. “So… so,” Felice fumbles to redirect things, unwilling to try to keep up with Emerson in his mind terrain. “. So, if you’re thinking about all this smart crap, then why do you hang around with a bunch of skinhead losers?”