Hard Mouth Read online

  Out the living room window was a view of the research campus—within it acres of top-notch education, soup smells in the break rooms, shoes worn down while no one was looking, telephone détentes about budgets, bringing good science to good people for the greater good—and beyond that, the gleaming highway with its constant loop of shooting cars, headlights on—one strip gold, the other taillight red—then even farther out, the pebbled barrier walls, the tops of trees; and above all a red cloud ceiling hanging low with light pollution, convex somehow, a heavenly belly. I was not used to being up so high. My father, who had always felt irritable in apartment buildings for professional reasons, preferred his sweeping views from the top of the Washington Monument or similar. Let home be simple, for resting your sleepy head, he’d say. Let me go out, into the world, to see such a view! Never mind the windows in the Monument were small, and made everything look like a dollhouse oil painting.

  I saw I had crossed the apartment and was standing against the glass. From behind me Omar asked gently did I want a drink. I said yes. He was an ideal host—a charming, harmless flirt, a flatterer, a profferer, a light ribber. It was a momentary feint of pleasure. I dined upon it, unready to digest.

  Soon I found myself propped against the kitchen island, between the host and Hill, who fiddled with a dime. Monica was sitting in a loveseat beneath a pendant lamp in the corner, dangling a shoe from her foot: The lamp lit her up, how lit she was, how lit we all were. Omar poured expensive clear liquor over clear-eyed ice into heavy tumblers. I tittered and forgot cancer. I swilled and forgot my blousy trash bag of a pal.

  When I think about this night, it is grossly and glamorously shellacked with the intoxication of belonging. It marked the beginning of an era of habit: to act outside of what felt comfortable.

  One moment I felt sober and the next, soused. The walls seemed to corset me. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can’t. I really apologize.” I didn’t know what I was apologizing for. Had I been drugged? No. Hill said something to me, then Monica. Omar’s body stiffened into a truss. Monica kicked off her other shoe. The three friends united to support me, my tipping body. One of them held my wrist in three fingers. And, as I lay down, that wrist was placed at my side, my self a rock thrown and sinking into the center of a deep stream. In fact I was on the couch. There I did my best to calm the current of my vision, my claustrophobia, my sweat, my alcoholic nausea.

  When all had calmed and cooled, an hour or more passed, I got up and crossed the room.

  “Oh, it’s our coma patient,” Monica said, from where she sat on the kitchen island, her legs open and Omar leaning between them. I wondered what I had missed.

  “You’re just in time,” Hill said, holding out a glass of water. I wondered was it Kool-Aid, Jonestown-style. Fine, I thought. OK, I thought.

  Of course it was only water. “How are you feeling?” Monica asked. What time was it. Outside I saw a watery dark. There were no taillights or headlights on the highway anymore, or, then, just one or two cars whizzing like mites. I felt sawed in half, a breeze between. I smiled to show I was fine; I stopped midway between the living area and kitchen, turned, found the nearest chair, something upholstered, and landed.

  All three new friends rotated toward me from the kitchen island. Hill, Omar, Monica. They patted one another encouragingly. They continued to gulp the hooch. The lucky lived at a different tempo. I was unlucky but not unluckiest. I merely lived slow, under the reeking pendulum of death. In their company I saw how this had marked me. I attempted to refocus my vision. I was still drunk.

  Had I been able to choose the follow-up event from a menu of the two biggest options—sex, death—I would have surely chosen sex: something redolent of the seventies and future both.

  But though the set was primed for hedons, I, still recovering, sat on my hands literally. This inaction seemed to drive the lovely night into a crater I would not for some time leave. If it is not sex, it is death. If not quickly, then eventually.

  “Are you okay, Denise?” asked Hill. “Drink your water.”

  I noted the glass, which had appeared in my hand, and obeyed. He had left the kitchen island to approach me. Upon his arrival he stroked my hair. I liquidated.

  “I want a pizza,” Monica announced. She slapped the island in emphasis.

  “You don’t,” Omar said. “You want some nice endive or carrots or some kale.”

  “The more you look at the aged, the more it seems like a crapshoot,” Monica said.

  “It doesn’t matter what you do, right? We’re all fucked.”

  “So why do you run marathons?” Hill asked Monica, winking at me. I had forgotten I was in the room.

  “Because, I’ll tell you why.” Monica raised her glass. “Because I drink enough to pickle my fascia back to front.”

  “I’m not sure it’s possible to pickle collagen,” Hill said, then addressed me: “I was premed for a couple years . . . No, it must be. Pickled pigs’ feet. Hooves and all.”

  Omar was then bent into the open fridge, ravaging his crisper. “I have carrots with the tops still on, the aforementioned kale, a few asparagus spears . . .”

  “I want none of those,” Monica responded. “I would like most in the world to have pizza.”

  “Pizza, okay, if not nutrition, then, think of the carbon footprint. Delivery.” I noted Hill was fucking with her. “One round trip of emissions for one meal for one person?”

  “I was going to share.”

  “It’s tragic,” Omar added.

  I thought to myself that it was not tragic. Or: it was not tragic yet. That was the point of climate change—so sluggish then that we wouldn’t care as much as we should’ve. Later would come fires, floods, displacement, condo towers built on the coast of Florida with insufficient accommodations for the sea level’s rise—it seemed my grog was evaporating. I had a feeling, en route to a waking, warm nausea, that I had once been intelligent. That feeling was a scam.

  I was doing my best to keep body and soul together. That was Pop’s saying, something he’d rustled up somewhere when he was first sick, a homily in response to any inquiry. “Working on keeping body and soul together.” All at once he’d started saying it, and then it was there forever: an unretractable obelisk pricking up from the formerly peaceful ground.

  Omar sat on the floor with his kale, waving it like a victorious Olympian. Everyone laughed, even me. He scrabbled up from the floor with Hill for leverage.

  “All of our decisions mean something,” he declared. Monica snorted and came to sit in the chair beside me.

  “Can you go through life worrying about all that?” I asked. “Doesn’t it get tiresome?”

  “A cynical geneticist,” Hill said. “Fascinating.”

  “It’s not that fascinating,” Omar said. “You only start out being idealistic. Idealism is directional toward cynicism necessarily.”

  “Genes, or any inherited thing, are destiny, if anything’s destiny,” I said flatly.

  “You’re completely right,” said Omar. “Especially when it comes to certain samples of the population, certain ethnicities and predispositions combined with systemic—medical even—oppressions—”

  “Then what was with the kale just now?” Hill interrupted.

  I didn’t want Hill to have interrupted Omar because what Omar had been saying was interesting. All night it had been babble. In not knowing anything else this had been adequate. But now Omar returned to babble, relubricating, sighing, answering: “Habit.”

  “Halibut!” Monica piped from the loveseat, giggling. She slid from the chair down to the floor. Omar found a bower beside her.

  “That’s depressing,” he said.

  “I read a thing that half the time when you think you’re ordering one kind of fish at a restaurant it’s another,” Omar said.

  “Yeah,” Monica said. “I read that too.”

  “Overfishing!” Omar said.

  “What do you work on again?” I asked Hill. It was unclear if we had
covered this.

  He told me nuclear nonproliferation. He told me “liaison between analysts and politicians.”

  “He’s the good kind of lobbyist,” Monica said, in a confidential way that made me feel like they must’ve slept together at some point.

  “That why we keep him around,” Omar added.

  “How’s it going?”

  “How’s what going?”

  “The proliferation or non-, or—”

  “Eh,” Hill shrugged and winked again. He was an overeager winker. It was not endearing.

  “What do you mean, ‘eh’?” I asked.

  “I mean, you win some, you lose some.”

  “Do you know ahead of time, before the winning and the losing?”

  “My job is to tell the politicians. The whiches and whens are for the analysts.”

  “How do they figure it out?”

  “It’s a combination of number crunching and game theory, or, I don’t know—strategy.”

  “Are they right much?” I asked.

  “They’re right enough to keep their jobs,” Omar said.

  “Sure, they’re right enough. But numbers don’t control sociopolitical forces. They just predict their movements and produce probability,” Hill offered blearily, rotely, as if he were making small talk about a football game.

  “Why can’t they control it?” I asked. I didn’t mean to ask this.

  “They get out of control sometimes. The empire is imperfect,” said Omar.

  “Like what?”

  “North Korea, obviously. India and Pakistan and Russia for some others. To say nothing of Iraq and cakes of whatever, a few Japanese fatalities—” Omar offered.

  “The Japanese fatalities were an energy issue. Not an arms issue. And so not really my fault,” said Hill.

  “Whose fault was it then, God’s?” Omar asked.

  Hill was silent for a moment, gob-stopped, cheek-slapped, silently gulping, and then: “God’s?”

  We all took turns looking stunned. Then guffawed. The inaugural meeting of the Friday Night Atheists was going swimmingly.

  “Let me pose a question then,” Omar said, moving from the floor into the chair above. He began to give Monica a neck rub. “Probability, Mark, that the world will end as a result of us blowing it up?”

  “Statistically, or in my opinion?”

  “In your expert opinion.”

  “Goddamn small.”

  “But it would only take a button or two, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, in one model. But the Cold War is over. We’re all too scared, it turns out, to push the buttons. Or if at some point it turns out we aren’t, it’s too late to save us all anyway, and we deserve what’s coming.”

  “Yowza, Mark. What about the chance of an accident with a computer?”

  “Microscopic.”

  “Terrorists? Robots?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Outside of my purview.”

  “Then how do you propose the world will end?”

  “Slowly, and painfully, and while hardly anyone in this country is watching.”

  At this Monica disengaged her neck from Omar’s hands, flattened herself to the rug. “Must you be so awful all the time?”

  “No, but I like to be.” Then Hill winked at me once again, and pulled me down to the rug beside him. I ventured it was one wink too far. He had clean nails. I’d noticed this earlier as he’d picked through a tech magazine on the counter. His lunulas were white as a gallery wall. I imagined what it would be like to spend an afternoon with him. I wondered if he would at some point stop winking. I tugged his collar, just to see what it felt like, and when he jumped, he gave me a funny little look I couldn’t decode. I felt tired again.

  “I feel tired,” I announced.

  For the first time that night all the strangers looked like strangers. I’d interrupted their fun. “Drink your water,” the closest stranger said. My glass remained full as it had ever been.

  “Go lay down,” the lady stranger said. “It’s late.”

  An angry flush swept my cheeks. At last I drank the water. I got up and walked over to the sectional. If you like to be liked, a new friend can make you feel immortal. If you don’t, the whole thing is exhausting. “You know what scares me?” said one stranger. “Gray goo.” I made my body horizontal. I closed my eyes.

  “See, that’s what I’m talking about,” said another. “Nanotechnology could easily get away from us.”

  “Trillions of infinitesimally small monsters, invisible to the human eye, invading us cell by cell . . .”

  In the last little dregs of waking, I thought how I did not fear an end to the world as I knew it, the way these people did; for I did not know much of the world, and what I did know I did not connect with joy. I was filled to the brim with dread; it threatened to spill blackly from my mouth.

  THAT NIGHT, I fell asleep on Omar’s couch. Later I woke to Hill’s insistent finger petting my neck. I pretended sleep until the finger retreated. When later I opened my eyes I was sure I could see Gene’s silhouette against the window. Hitchcock sans elegance. I ignored him. Yet there he stood as I allowed Hill to advance. I did not think I liked to be watched but couldn’t see another way.

  “Finally,” Hill breathed into my ear. “I can’t believe how long that all took.”

  “Men must learn to be patient,” I said to Hill and Gene. Gene, for his own sake, turned away.

  Here Hill had been waiting. I had not been waiting, just living. Now I was half-asleep. What did he think of me, I wondered, looking over at Gene’s broad back. What did I think of me. Did it matter? I was raw with this.

  I wondered what it must be like to be another person. I then remembered how people have bodies, and how these bodies, that people have, work in such fascinating configurations. Here, a flash of sexual excitement.

  Hill lifted my ass and put his knee between my thighs. “Hello,” he said. “Is this okay?” A wrapped condom flashed dimly between his fingers.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course.” I looked back over to Gene but he was no longer there.

  I stripped from the waist down. Hill pressed into me. His khaki pants rubbed against the summer dry skin of my legs. They made a slight scraping sound, like Velcro peeling from itself.

  AFTER, I FELL asleep. When the sun cut over the research campus I cracked my eyes open and rose. There were some withering greens, a couple of empty bottles, Monica’s shoes, tipped: each object a body unto itself. Hill was down beside the couch. From above I looked at his clean, clear face. Then he opened his eyes and we smiled together. He got up. His arm, an intimate hook, tried to pull me back down. He told me I should stay a while.

  I left. I walked down the hall. The elevator doors whooshed. I was carried downward thinking: goodbye forever you new friends.

  I SPENT THE next day vomiting into the toilet, and drinking water. The bathroom linoleum was sticky with my kneeling sweat. As I let loose my bucketfuls of bile, I thought I could hear Gene through the bathroom door, cackling till he coughed. “Get!” I shouted, acid hoarse. If he had answered he might have said: If you can’t handle a tipple, then you may best abstain. Instead the laughing stopped.

  I was glad for it. Often Gene was the quicksand I found myself in, or the air I wished I couldn’t breathe. I thanked myself for small favors and resumed my retch. Later I let the shower beat my skin, and dried in the cutting breeze of central air.

  That evening, still clouded, I drove from my far-flung part of the county—that rural land prickling with new construction—to my folks’ denser burb. The highway was newly paved. Still my sedan shuddered once I hit sixty. In response I said to it: “I know how you feel.”

  I was trying to figure out whether I would tell my parents about my dismissal. I decided to stay mum. As I parked on the street I noticed the rosebush leaves were pus yellow. I went on walking.

  In the kitchen the takeout was already on the table, carton flaps bouncing slightly under the ceiling fan’s agitation. Ma
greeted me with the usual pose: arms out, a flattening hug. She was trim; no, she was gaunt; no, she was simply always skinnier.

  “Where’s Ken?” I asked. I saw that Pop was propped at the end of the table, two pillows behind him. “What is this, Passover?” He seemed to be courting invalidity. It made me mad.

  “Your father wanted a little extra,” Ma said.

  “Where’s Ken?” I asked again.

  “I sent him out for some ice cream.”

  “You want anything to drink?” I asked Pop from the kitchen, my head in the empty larder. “You guys have some grocery shopping to do.”

  “He’s got some of that ginger tea going,” Ma said.

  “I was asking Pop,” I said.

  “Get some serving spoons?”

  I dug my fingers between the spoons in the silverware drawer. They clicked together in a way I did not like.

  “Will you do me a favor, while you’re here?”

  I nodded. Ma’s hair was frizzed into a halo; she wore saggy pants covered in flour or powder or soap. She took both of my hands and made me look at her in her sad, thinning face. We did a little sidestep so that we were standing like solemn dance partners in the doorway between the kitchen and hall. “Denise,” she began. “I need to go over some documents with you, for the hospital, and for after.” The house was overcold; I was in need of an overcoat. Or anything that could hide me.

  “I’d prefer not to talk right this moment?” I asked. Or simply said it.

  Then the front door opened and behind it was Ken. The hot day came with him. His shopping bag crackled; his hello warmed me up. “Hey beautiful,” he said, and kissed me on the head.

  “Chocolate-chocolate chip?” I asked.

  Ma kissed Ken’s cheek to formalize the favor done. I will admit to having a hot dense feeling in my shoulders, then. Because he was not my mother’s child he could pretend to take joy in service. Or perhaps he was sincere.

  “Can you tell?” I whispered into his ear, as we sat down at the table to eat. I sniffed. “Do I smell like eighty proof?”

  “It’s okay to not be okay.” He hugged my head into his solid chest like I was a dog. I wondered how he already knew.