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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781646030262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Regal House Publishing |
| Publication date: | 03/02/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 227 |
| File size: | 989 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
Part One
Five grand in savings intended for his first semester at the University of Minnesota Medical School affords Connor first and last months' rent, two months of job searching, and several cases of beer. Sleepless summer in South Chicago. Teens fight in the streets. At night police sirens whine like starving infants. In the afternoon he perches on the landing of the staircase zigzagging down the side of his apartment complex, watching the bus stop below exchange the city's elderly and hobbled and stoned, its airport workers and gas station clerks and toddlers clutching their mothers' hands for balance. Craterous potholes dictate the monotonous swerves of traffic. On the other side of the street, shattered windows honeycomb the burnt-orange brick building identical to his; on the moonlit sidewalk, glass like shards of gold glints, which curfew-less schoolkids gleefully chuck at streetlights.
He sleeps late, watches movies on his computer, orders-in Chinese and deep dish. He gets drunk night after night and gains belly chub. Thankful whenever the unreliable internet connection abbreviates his job hunt, he closes his laptop and naps, somehow exhausted. His father, Bill, calls him once a day, every day. Occasionally, Connor answers.
"You short on money?"
"I'll have a job soon."
"Where?"
"I'm going to bed."
"It's only seven."
"I have to work on an application first."
"Finance is a good career, Connor. We could get you licensed, you know. You could work with me, or at another office if you don't want to see me too much. At least till you figure something else out."
"Thanks. I'll think about it."
"Or, you could lie to me and say you're taking night classes, or blogging, or training to be a cage fighter. Something."
"I'm trying out for a reality TV show."
"That's more like it. Say, I could get you set up at a branch there. Even part-time, you could make some money."
"I should go. Love you."
"Love you, too. Give me your address, Connor."
"A check might not make it to me, anyway."
"Still could try. How long will you be gone?"
"I don't know."
Connor's neighbor, Lee, eats Connor's food, drinks Connor's beer, and pawns Connor's clothes for junk money. Connor misses him when he's gone. One evening Lee says he's leaving town to see his sister in Charlotte.
"Thought you said she lived in Durham?"
"What's the difference to you?"
The beer bottles in his backpack clink together as Lee rushes out of the apartment.
At four in the morning, he knocks on Connor's door. Connor opens it to find him sweating and shivering under a yellowing bedsheet, the corner of which he's balled up and stuffed in his mouth to staunch the bleeding from a lost front tooth. Lee meanders in, sits cross-legged on the splintered kitchen linoleum.
"The fuck happened?"
"Don't know," Lee mumbles into the cloth clot. "You got any beer?"
"You don't know what happened to your tooth?"
"And I don't miss it, either."
Connor pours a glass of water, asks to look inside Lee's mouth.
Lee opens wide.
"Could get infected," Connor says.
"You a doctor?"
"No. Pre-med, though."
"Fuck that."
"You should go to the hospital."
"I'll sleep it off. Just got carried away."
"Let's go," Connor says, holding out his hand. "I'll call an Uber."
"No one's getting us."
"We'll walk, then."
"I got an immune system like a dumpster, fuck you mean."
"Did you overdose?"
"You'll know it when you see it."
"I don't want to see that."
"Get high with me, you won't notice a thing," Lee quips.
"Right."
"Stop stressing out. Everything's cool."
Lee stands, stick-thin and hunched, the black mustache above his lip crusted darkly with blood. He's thirty-six, though the fleshy bags under his eyes belong to a man twenty years older. He tightens the sheet around his shoulders and smirks at Connor, who hands him the glass of water. He drinks it in two gulps.
"I got a wife. Got two boys across town and a good gig working construction when they take me back. Even got a degree in astronomics, fuck you mean. Bring me some beers over, would you," he says, as he shuffles out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
* * *
At the library, two bus transfers away, Connor reads magazines and newspapers and blogposts, eyeing vagrants who exploit the lax bathroom policy by washing up with wet, soapy paper towels and, as winter approaches, by shooting up in the stalls. They call him Fruity, because, instead of money, he gives them apples and oranges. They tell him about their murdered brothers and imprisoned aunts, about their wealthy cousins who moved away and don't call anymore. They tell him Lee's wife left him when one of their boys drowned in an inflatable backyard swimming pool many summers ago.
He switches to vodka mixed into half full lemonade containers, whiskey into pop bottles, and drinks while he walks the city, thinking about how much money he has left, how he'd fare in a fight with the tougher strangers he passes, about writing poetry and learning to play an instrument. About farming a plot of land, his future wife and children. About why religion has prevailed so long on this planet, why music is beautiful, why ketchup tastes so much better than mustard. About sex.
"What are you reading right now?" Bill asks.
"The newspaper. There are always copies at the library."
"A day late?"
"Free."
"I'll pay for a subscription," Bill offers. "They'll take them right to your place."
"It's better this way. Things are okay, Dad. You're worrying too much."
"That's what I'm supposed to do."
"Jesus Christ."
"What?"
"Okay then. It's nothing. It's good. Thank you."
On the first snowfall of the season, four scrawny preteens fan out on the sidewalk so he can't pass. He steps out onto the dead street and they circle him. He tries to play it cool, tells them he has no money, then raises his fists and turns in a circle as they lunge toward and away from him, taunting. He cowers. They rap him on the skull a few times, and since he left his wallet between his mattress and bedsprings, they take his booze and jacket. He runs home, sits on the floor of the scum-slick shower, head down, arms on his knees, catching water in his palms. Then he clenches his fists.
He stays in bed for two days, until Lee cheers him up with a bowl of cold off-brand cereal. The spoiled milk makes him ill. He loses ten pounds vomiting.
He goes off the grid. No library, internet, blogs, emails, calls, or texts. He does push-ups and sit-ups and leans his mattress up against his bedroom wall as a punching bag. He considers buying a handgun.
"That's stupid," Lee says, smoking a spliff by Connor's cracked bedroom window. "Stupid as fuck."
"What about mace?"
"Or a rape whistle?" Lee says. He takes a hit. "I know what you should do."
"You got all the answers."
"You're overthinking everything. It's sad as hell."
"Fuck you."
"If you plan on being an idiot, you might as well go all the way. Stick around, knock up some women. Get hooked on junk, like me.
Meanwhile, buy a gun and blast those kids away."
"None of that will happen."
"I know. Because you're going back to Minneapolis."
"There's nothing there for me."
"Nothing here, either, you selfish little fucker. Stupid, stupid, stupid ..." Lee shakes his head as he hands Connor the spliff and leaves the apartment.
Two days later, just after midnight, Connor notices Lee's door cracked. He steps inside and finds him quivering in bed. Sweat dewdrops tremble on his forehead. The drenched bedsheets reek of body odor and vomit. One by one Lee has plucked out mustache hairs with his fingers; dozens of whiskers pepper his pillowcase. Connor squats next to the bed, takes Lee's wrist, and begins to measure his pulse.
"Fuck are you doing?"
"Stay still."
"Don't pull that shit."
"I'm calling an ambulance. I'll be right back. Hang tight."
Lee grabs Connor's arm. "You don't know nothing. Don't call nobody. Don't pull that shit. I'm not making a scene."
"We'll meet them out front. You could die."
"This is nothing. I'm going to sleep. Get the fuck out of my apartment."
"Carol can drive us in."
"Carol don't pull shit, fuck you mean."
"What would your sons do if they were me?"
Lee bares his teeth at him, showing off the gap in his top row, then bites his bottom lip. He rolls onto his back and looks at the ceiling. "I have my PhD in Ultra-Physicism, you cocky prick. Go get Carol."
Connor jogs to the building across the street. Lee's friend Carol doesn't answer the door. When he returns, Lee's door is locked.
* * *
Connor applies for an auto parts warehouse gig six blocks away. The hiring manager happens to be the former father-in-law of one of the library junkies, who offers to put in a good word for him.
"I don't know, man," Connor says. "Was it an ugly divorce?"
"You know a pretty one? Wouldn't do it if it wouldn't help," the man replies, peeling an orange with his cruddy fingernails. His bone-white hair is parted in the middle, ponytailed in the back with a rubber band. Last month he lost his glasses. Now he squints.
"How come you don't work for him?"
"I'm self-employed. And last I saw my wife, she woke me up with a hot curling iron on my ass-cheek."
"Whatever you think, I guess."
Awaiting the warehouse's decision, he watches every Academy Award-nominated film of the past forty years and texts with Vanessa, an ex-girlfriend from college. She works nights at a movie theater to help pay the U of M's Master of Social Work program tuition. She says she admires him for doing his own thing, though she offers to hook him up with a ticket-tearer post at the theater, should he come home. Soon they're sexting.
He jogs five miles a day, loses his paunch, and gains three pounds of muscle. His knuckles crack and bleed from the cold night air. His tawny beard is thin on his cheeks, but thick around his mouth and below his chin. His chestnut hair is long beneath his stocking cap. His eyes sink beneath his greasy tallow complexion, glimmers of guttering candlelight.
"You changed your profile picture on Facebook," Bill says. "You're looking thin."
"Been running every day."
"Hair's getting long. And the beard."
"Sure."
"You going to church there?" Bill asks.
Connor drops his head, pinches his eyes shut, and taps his phone against his forehead.
"You hear stories about kids is all," Bill says. "Sometimes, people just slip into ... different ways of thinking. Like, you're off the grid. Maybe you're getting into trouble, or under some type of spell ..."
"It's not religion, Dad. Just a beard. I can't afford razors, and I have nothing and no one to shave for. It doesn't look that bad, and anyway there's nothing wrong with Islam."
"Of course not. I just ... you're spending so much time alone, reading books. I guess ... well, nobody knows ... fathers worry. What do you do with all your time there?" Bill asks.
"I run, look for work. I get tired and go to sleep. I don't even have the energy to face Mecca these days."
"Don't have to be a jerk about it," Bill says.
"Could've played along and duped you if I wanted to."
"By the way, you have to start on your student loans, unless you want to join the army or something."
"I got it."
"Really?"
"I got it."
"Connor, did med school really reject you?"
Connor scratches his beard with his phone.
Bill continues, "One of your professors called my office. She couldn't believe it."
"Fuck, Dad."
"Just tell the truth."
"I wish I'd gotten rejected."
They're silent for half a minute, then Bill asks once more if Connor needs money.
The next morning the warehouse calls to tell him he cleared his background check, and he accepts a graveyard shift cleaning the facility and prepping the next day's shipments. He celebrates with a beer downtown, then buys a used bike for his commute. On his second shift he leaves it outside, leaning against the back entrance; in the morning, it's missing. To punish himself for his carelessness, he starts walking to work.
The dusty florescent lightbulbs streaking across the ceiling have begun to blacken, lending the building the ambience of a morgue. Ceiling-high racks line the walls, cluttered with hoods and bumpers and fenders and doors, some unpackaged and glossy, some bound in foam and cellophane or boxed up. He makes a pot of coffee and plays music on the office stereo. Then he vacuums and wipes down the upstairs managerial offices and employee lounge. Afterward, he descends the metal staircase to the concrete floor, where for the rest of the night he readies the following day's orders. Prepping only takes two hours, so he sweeps and mops, sets traps for the mice nesting among stale inventory long ago rotated into the darker corners of the warehouse. A decaying raccoon carcass, which he scoops out with a plastic shovel and tosses into the dumpster out back, makes him gag. For the final hours of his shifts, just before dawn, he eats breakfast and reads the newspaper, calculating his budget in the margins of the sports section or underlining for his memory the names of prominent bank executives, politicians, and lawyers. He thinks about Vanessa.
Interested in everything but medicine, he checks out library books about international trade agreements and sanctions, beads bartered amid Sudanese conflict, the World Wars, existentialism, OPEC, the IMF, Bohemian anti-Jewish pogroms, Bolshevism, and Industrial Revolution working conditions. His hair and beard lengthen. His chest broadens. He spends part of his first check on work boots and fresh vegetables at a market fifteen minutes away by bus. He attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings in a nearby church basement, and on his day off, weather permitting, plays chess in a small treeless park with one of the members, an old woman who wears ankle-length corduroy dresses. When she finally asks him about his drug problem and he admits he's never had one, she collects her chess pieces and board and leaves. At their next meeting, no one looks him in the eye. He doesn't attend another.
He begins running two miles a day. Three. Five. Extension-cord spindly. He earns a ten-cent-an-hour raise and picks up an evening job bartending. He argues politics and religion with the regulars, helps them back onto their stools when they fall off.
One night at the warehouse, while shoveling the back entrance sidewalk, he spots his bike sticking out of a shallow frozen pond. He breaks up the ice and pulls the bike free. The next day he buys a lock.
Vanessa says she wants to visit him in Chicago some weekend.
"You'd come here?"
"You don't want me to?"
"It's not great."
"And?"
"I mean, I want to see you," he says.
"And you're not coming home now, so ... "
"Not much to do here."
"I'll drive."
"Take the bus. Your car might get jacked."
"It's not that nice of a car."
"You'll see. I'm sorry. Take the bus."
He scrubs the shower, cleans the fridge. He meets her downtown and they ride the bus back to his apartment. Her things are packed in a large purse. She's gangly, with copper eyes, wavy honey blonde hair that reaches her shoulders, and a white scar running vertically from the corner of her mouth. Her complexion is creamy, lightly rouged. He puts his arm around her. She squeezes his thigh.
"Saw your dad at the theater. He told me to bring you back with me."
"He'd like that."
"He said you don't want him to visit."
"That's not true."
"He was with a woman."
"No, he wasn't."
"Whoever it was, it wasn't their first date."
"Sneaky."
"When I moved out, my parents got a dog."
Back at his apartment, he hangs her coat over the front door handle and puts her purse in his bedroom. She asks if she can take a shower. He leads her down the hallway to the bathroom, shows her where the towels are and how to deal with the tricky faucet. The bathroom is so small that she has to step into the tub to open the door fully. She pulls him close to shut the door behind him, then he steps back, against it. She runs shower water. As she tells him about the professors and students she's met in orientation, all the officious and dull and charming and kind people, she undresses to her black bra and panties, neatly folds her sweatshirt and shirt and jeans and socks, and stacks them on the sink. The mirror fogs. She fingers a condom from her jeans pocket and places it atop her clothes.
After showering, they sit in the living room, drinking whiskey from coffee mugs and eating Chinese food from paper boxes. She tucks her hair into the back of her hoodie.
"You're hiding," she says.
"No."
"You are. You'd probably enjoy med school. You'd do well. I know you would."
"Tell me more about your program," he replies.
"See. You don't want to talk about you."
They switch boxes.
"Are you depressed?" she asks.
"I was before."
"I've never slept with someone with so much facial hair."
"I'm honored."
She giggles, a few quiet huffs. "I didn't know I liked whiskey," she says.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bliss"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Fredrick Soukup.
Excerpted by permission of Regal House Publishing, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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