Текст книги "The Porcupine of Truth"

Автор книги: Bill Konigsberg

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“Talk to me,” I say. “What’s going on? What happened?”

She sighs. “You want the long version?”

I nod.

“It happened last week. You sure you wanna hear this?”

I nod again.

“Well, let me back up. My dad and me, we’ve always been real close, especially around sports. I’m big into track and volleyball. He’s also real religious. Took us to church every Sunday of my life that I can remember. Ate that shit up. I did too, when I was younger. All that junk about a personal relationship with Christ and offering up my sins and stuff.

“So anyway, I guess early last week, he got suspicious that I was dating some boy, because I was away from home a lot. So he tracked my cell phone. He rang the doorbell and scared the crap out of my girlfriend, Kayla, who answered the door in a robe. He barged in to Kayla’s room, and I was in her bed and I’m like, ‘Dad.’ Shit. Well, this ain’t great.

“And that wasn’t cool, because it showed no trust, and I never gave him any reason not to trust me. I never showed the man anything but respect my whole entire life. We have one of those ‘Get in my truck right now’ moments, and he drives me home. We don’t talk, don’t say a word the whole way. The next day he sits me down at the dining room table and explains that he’s made some calls. I’m going to this place called Flowing Rivers in Mesa, Arizona. I have an aunt who lives there. And this place, he explains, is going to make me straight, through the Jesus.”

“Jesus,” I say. My mind is running wild. It’s like, who does that to their daughter? Try to change her? And this other, tiny part of me is thinking, Well, could that work? Could we be a couple if you went there? Because I’d totally wait for you.

“Right?” Aisha says, rubbing her eyes. “Because let’s just say I’m no longer a believer. So I ask him, ‘What if I won’t go?’ My voice is shaking. And my voice never shakes.

“And he says, ‘I don’t know, baby girl. But whatever you do, you won’t do it here under my roof.’

“My mom didn’t feel that way, but in our house, Dad is in charge. So I went into my room and thought about it. And for a few seconds there, I was thinking, Just go to Arizona. It won’t work, you’ll leave, and either you’ll come home again and Dad will calm down, or you’ll start a new life down there. But then I thought, What if it does work?

“I saw my reflection in the mirror. I thought about how, if I changed, I’d be someone else. I like me, you know? I thought, My dad has no right. He has no right to take me out of me. So I went out and I said, ‘Dad, we can work this out. We’ll get a therapist over here, and they’ll help. I’m not a bad person; I’m just a lesbian. Have been since forever. You know me. I’m your daughter. I was always exactly this way.’ But my dad. He just wasn’t having it. He said, ‘You’re going to Mesa.’ And I said I wasn’t, and he said ‘Get out,’ and I got out.”

“Jesus,” I say again. I try to imagine being kicked out of my home. Thousands of times in New York I sat on the radiator in my room, looking out the window at the mostly closed blinds of strangers across the air shaft, thinking about what it would be like to live in one of those other apartments. Thinking maybe I should just leave. And then I was like, And do what? And that’s when that idea goes away, because a fantasy is a fantasy. And the reality? I can’t imagine a reality of being on my own with no resources that doesn’t suck.

“I packed a bag, and that night I slept in my car,” Aisha says. “The next day, I went back to Kayla’s place, but she disappears when the going gets tough, I guess, because she wasn’t so much about me staying with her. I tried a couple friends, no dice. I couchsurfed a couple days with a family I found online before I wore out my welcome. There’s a women’s shelter downtown, but the idea of living in a shelter made me feel a little too much like I was really and truly homeless, so I nixed that. I guess it was Saturday night when I decided on the zoo, mostly because it seemed remote and safe, and I like zoos. Animals. Someday, I want to be a vet. Well, I did. I was gonna study veterinary medicine at Rocky Mountain this fall, but my dad withdrew me.”

“Shit,” I say.

“And then Dad turned off my phone. Had to get a new one on my own. And it ain’t easy getting a job for the summer, and even if it was, it’s not like you can just get a job and get an apartment. You need to bankroll some cash first. I have some cash saved up, but I’ve been petrified that if I start to use it, I’ll run out and then I’d really be in a situation.

“So I slept there in the zoo, where I showed you. The last four nights now.” She sighs. “What I really want to do, I guess, is get the hell out of Billings. I mean, this place sucks, and if I’m not part of my family anymore, why not go somewhere else? But part of me feels like I have to try and make it right with Dad. And anyway, I don’t have that much money. I’m a realist. I don’t want to end up on the streets of Portland or somewhere. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but it better happen soon,” she concludes.

“That’s … wow,” I say. I can’t do any better.

“I know. Not what you signed up for, right?”

I take her hand. She looks at me and tilts her head slightly, and I remember that we’re not actually boyfriend and girlfriend. I drop it. She half smiles.

“Sorry,” I say.

She shrugs.

“My dad’s dying,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t know. Sorry.”

“I mean, for what it’s worth. I don’t want to be all, ‘Poor me, my dad is dying, waah waah waah.’ But yeah, that’s why I’m here. Before Monday, I hadn’t seen him since I was three.”

“Wow.”

“He’s a drunk. It’s a lot of fun over at our house.”

“I bet.”

“Fathers,” I say.

She snorts. “Right? What really pisses me off is the whole ‘man of God’ thing. What is that? You disown your daughter in the name of God? I grew up with that evangelical shit. I’ll tell you, the second he kicked me out, that was over. Looking up at the stars in the zoo one night, I just realized. Religion is supposed to be all about loving thy neighbor, but religious people are hypocrites. Kicking your daughter out is an act of love? Please.

“I’m glad I’m out of there,” she says, scooping some gravel up in her fingers and then throwing it back onto the ground. “I’m glad.”

I think about religious zealots, like the ones who flew into the towers on 9/11, and the people who preach damnation for sinners on the subway. Once on the downtown 1 train, this cross-eyed guy started screaming about the wrath of God, and how it’s all the gays’ fault. This militant gay dude got in the guy’s face and told him to shut up, that he didn’t need some preacher to tell him right from wrong. When he was done, most of the car clapped for him. The preacher guy got off at the next stop. I clapped too. I mean, isn’t God (who doesn’t exist, by the way) supposed to be this all-loving Father to Us All?

“Religious people suck,” I say, and Aisha nods and continues to trace a pattern in the loose gravel around her, like a sole figure skater practicing.

We sit for a while, and somehow I feel a little relaxed, which is weird because nothing is okay, not really.

“So wait,” I say. “How come that felt kind of like a first date? Am I crazy?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “That wasn’t cool.”

“Were you, like, playing me?” I ask.

She takes a deep breath, looks up and to the right. Then she looks directly at me.

“No and yes. I mean, I knew you dug me, and I thought maybe … But I like you, Carson, really. You crack me up. I need a friend, and this isn’t the best place to be a lesbian, you know?”

I stand up. “C’mon,” I say, sure of myself while knowing that it’s not my call to make.

“Where are we going?” she says, slowly standing.

“Home,” I say. “You’re staying with me.”

“I WISH THERE was a way I could make sure my mother wasn’t, like, in the kitchen,” I say as we stand in front of the door to the house.

Aisha looks at me and raises an eyebrow. “You don’t really get lesbianism, do you, Carson?” she says.

I turn away from her and pretend to have trouble with the lock. I mean, as far as getting lesbianism is concerned, I do and I don’t, I guess. I mean, I get that she’s a lesbian, and that she likes girls, aka not me. But that doesn’t mean that I’m a lesbian too, if you know what I mean. Just because visiting a guy’s house doesn’t do much for her, that doesn’t mean that having a hot girl come over doesn’t do something for me.

“I would just rather tell them, I don’t know, tomorrow, I guess,” I say.

Aisha drove us back to the house in her red Dodge Neon, and on the way, I’d formulated about ten arguments for why we need to let Aisha stay. While my mom barely notices my existence and is very chill about almost everything always, I can’t really picture her going along with a strange girl moving into the house. And not knowing my dad, whose place we’re in, it’s really hard to imagine everyone will be like, Sure! Why not?

“This isn’t a hookup. You get that, right?”

“Yep. Not into me. Got it.”

She exhales loudly. “Forget it. Let’s just. I don’t know. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay, see ya,” I say, and this actually surprises her, because she turns quickly toward me, her eyes wide. “I’m kidding, God,” I say. “Like I’m really going to let you sleep with the monkeys because you won’t put out. Gimme a break. C’mon.”

I open the door for Aisha, and as she passes through, she says, “No monkeys at the zoo.”

And I reply, “Big shocker.”

Mom is searching through the refrigerator when we walk into the kitchen. Her hair is wet and she’s wearing a beige floral-print robe.

“We’re out of Greek yogurt,” she says to me when she hears my footsteps. When I don’t answer right away, she turns around.

“Oh,” she says, seeing Aisha and fiddling with her robe to make sure it’s closed, which it is. “You’ve brought a friend. How lovely.”

“Sorry, I should have called,” I say. “This is my new friend Aisha.”

They both say hi, and then we stand there, awkwardly.

“Would you like something to eat?” my mother asks.

“Do you have any Greek yogurt?” Aisha asks, and it’s spot on, because my mother, who isn’t always about the quirky humor, smiles.

“As a matter of fact, we don’t,” she says. She then pulls out a Tupperware container. “Strawberries?”

Aisha says she’d love some, and I realize she probably hasn’t been eating well. I pour some out on a plate, and I ask my mother if she and I can talk in the other room for a second. As Aisha sits at our kitchen table and gobbles berries, I follow my mom into the living room. My brain spins through all of the arguments I’ve come up with.

“What do you need, honey?” my mother asks. There’s an edge to her voice, and I hear it as, I can’t take one more thing, Carson. Not one more thing. She’s been here with Dad all day, which has probably not been great. The bags under her eyes look dark and heavy, like fruit scales at the supermarket.

“Aisha’s a lesbian and she got kicked out by her dad,” I say.

“Oh,” my mother says, and I realize the counselor in her will totally get this.

“It’s really bad. She’s been sleeping outside, and she’s an amazing person. You have to talk to her. She’s just so cool.”

“How long have you known her?”

It’s obviously a rhetorical question, since I have to have met her either Monday, yesterday, or today.

“We met at the zoo.”

“I see,” my mother says.

I stare at the ground and tap my foot a few times. “I’m just trying to figure out the right thing to do,” I say. “I mean, obviously, what would be best for her isn’t possible, probably, because, even though she’s a lesbian, she’s still a girl and all. So obviously she can’t stay here, right?” I lower my head and peer at her face.

My mother sighs. I don’t know what it feels like to have her tell me no, because I don’t ask for a lot, usually. I just sort of take what I need, and I’m pretty self-sufficient. But I think I’m about to find out what no sounds like. When she doesn’t say anything, I add, “She’s looking for work, so it’s not like she’ll be here except for at night.”

My mother sighs again. “If it’s okay with your dad, it’s fine,” she says. “Do what you feel is right, honey.”

I admit I’m a little shocked. Because even though it’s what I want, it just seems like, Wow. That was really, really easy.

I knock on my dad’s door. He opens it up, and it’s the first time I’ve seen him since our first meeting. His eyes are glassy, and I don’t know if he’s drunk or not.

I tell him the situation, and amazingly, he asks more questions than my mom did.

“You sure you’re not just saying she’s a lesbian so you can get some?” he asks, smirking.

I shake my head. I have no idea if he’s kidding or not. “No. She’s an actual lesbian.”

“Are you gay?” he asks.

“No, Dad. I’m not gay. Thanks for asking, though.”

He laughs. “So there is a part of you that digs this girl, right?”

I shrug and keep my calm. “It’s not gonna happen. She’s cool, though.”

He continues to smirk at me. “Attaboy. And just so you know, I would’ve been fine with you being gay too. I’m not like that and all.”

“Duly noted,” I say, and he laughs again.

“A lesbian in the basement. I like it,” he says. “I dig it.”

“Nineteen seventy-something wants its word back,” I reply, and my dad’s smile gets a little wider before he retreats back into his cave and shuts the door.

“He’s fine with it,” I say to my mom as I pass her, and she nods her head. I can’t quite tell, but it looks like her jaw is really tight.

I walk back into the kitchen. “Welcome home, I guess,” I say, and Aisha gives me an animated look of shock.

Once settled in the basement with me, Aisha heads off to the shower, saying it’s her first home shower in a few days, since she had been limited to showers at the Billings Athletic Club. I can hear the spray of the water from my room, and my heart starts beating fast. All I can do is think about what excuses I could come up with to go into the bathroom and somehow sneak a peek inside the shower curtain.

“Oh hey, I was just making sure there was enough soap…. Do you need me to hand you – oops! Sorry.”

“Oh hey, do you like music while you shower? I’m just going to put my iPhone dock in here – oops! Sorry.”

But I do none of these things. Instead, I count to 84 by sevens, and then 232 by eights. She comes out of the bathroom in one of my shirts and a pair of clean-ish shorts and puts her dirty clothes in the washer. I take her out for dinner at Wendy’s because frankly I’d rather shave my head than subject Aisha to dinner with my parents. After, we hang out in my room for hours and watch clips from YouTube on my laptop. I let her sit on the slowly sinking air mattress I had the pleasure of sleeping on the first two nights here, since she’s going to sleep there, and I sit on the carpet, aka my new bed, and lean up against the mattress.

After a while, she asks, “So aside from watching fascinating YouTube videos, what do you like to do?”

My perverted mind comes up with a few ideas of what I wish she means by that, and then I swallow those thoughts down. I think about it and come up blank. What do I like to do? Nothing. I like to do nothing. What’s wrong with me, and is it fixable?

“I don’t know,” I say. I click on a news video about this trend where kids sucker-punch strangers on the street. It’s a game called Knockout. We watch it, and I say, “Oh my God, people are stupid.” Aisha nods.

I click on another clip, a news story about two drunk guys stealing a penguin in Australia. Aisha laughs as they show the losers being dragged away in handcuffs. She says, “I wonder how they did it. Is it like, if you want to steal a penguin, you have to think like a penguin? Or maybe they dressed up like penguins and were all, ‘Come with us, buddy.’ And the little guy just went along?”

“So they dressed as fancy waiters?”

She laughs again, and I sigh a bit as I see how her tongue flicks up against the back of her front teeth. I think, I made that happen. I did that. Making Aisha laugh is like the big win I’ve never had. It’s what I like to do. It makes my insides flutter and my shoulders relax and I am home.

And then I think, Excellent, you are falling deeper in love with a lesbian.

“That’s not even the hard part,” I say. “The really hard part is stealing a penguin’s identity.”

Aisha leans back on her elbows. “What would you do with a penguin’s identity?”

I allow my eyes a little glimpse of her flat stomach and then I look away. “Maybe you’d give felons a second chance? I mean, it’s hard to start again, find a job and such when you’ve robbed a bank.”

“True.”

“So you go up to this felon, and you hand them a document, and you say, ‘You are now officially known as Mitchell T. Penguin. You have not committed any felonies, and all you’ve done thus far is mate for life with Lucille J. Penguin.”

“I think penguins are gay. I think I heard that somewhere,” she says.

“You know, not everyone is gay,” I say, and she gives me the finger. “Well, probably not all penguins are gay. I mean, that would be not the smartest strategy from a Darwinian standpoint.”

“You don’t know,” she says. “They could have surrogates.”

“Oh yes, penguin surrogates,” I say. “I’ve often heard of them.”

“You’re really weird,” she says. “I like you.”

“I like you too,” I answer, and I close the laptop. As the light in the room evaporates, I hear her exhale, and it sounds like the kind of breath you let out for the first time in a long time.

“Thanks, Carson. Really. Thank you. You are a good person.”

“No biggie,” I say, grinning widely because I know she cannot see me. “I simply saved your life.”

She snorts. I wrap myself in the blanket and settle in for a night on the carpet. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel alone.

I WAKE UP in the morning when I hear breathing in my ear. I open my eyes to find two eyes staring into mine from literally six inches away.

I start to scream, and a hand covers my mouth. Aisha’s hand.

“What the …?” I say into her palm.

“I always wanted to do that to someone,” she says, a silly look on her face. “Looked like you were about to wake up, so I just … hurried that process up a bit.”

I look around the still-dark room. “What time is it?”

“It’s six thirty,” she says.

“So yeah,” I mumble, turning over onto my stomach, a pale orange blanket the only thing between me and the carpet. “I probably wasn’t about to wake up.”

She pounces on me and wrestles me onto my back, and my ribs press hard into the floor, knocking the wind out of me. I can tell she’s kidding around, but I tense my whole body and fight against her.

It’s futile. She pins me on my back by holding my shoulders down with her hands, and she sits on my thighs. She looks down on me with this grin on her face, and I have to avoid her eyes. I’m in a pair of shorts, no shirt, with only a blanket over me, and she’s wearing just a T-shirt and panties. Girls don’t get it. They don’t get what they can do to us. It’s terrible and embarrassing.

“What?” she says.

“Leave me alone,” I mumble.

“Oh, come on,” she says, and when I don’t look at her, she gets off me. “Sorry. I was just foolin’.”

I sit up and curl my arms around my legs. I can feel the brooding coming on, but I don’t want to be that guy, so I shake it off. I yawn and stretch my arms out. “I’m not a morning guy. I am not a guy of the morning.”

“We need to talk,” Aisha says. She is sitting up on her bed, which is to say she is sitting on a fully deflated air mattress.

“Talk, woman,” I say.

“At what age did you become a hoarder? Have you considered going on the TV show?”

I raise an eyebrow, or at least I attempt to do Aisha’s one-eyebrow raise. I fail. “Huh?”

She points across the room at the boxes piled atop each other against the far wall. I saw those the first time I came downstairs, but the truth is I haven’t thought of them since. I look back over at Aisha, whose tank top is loose in all the right places. It’s early and my brain is barely functioning, and I have to remind myself not to gawk.

“Bring it up to the actual hoarder,” I say. “My dad.”

She stands and stretches her legs. “We’re living down here, not him. Can we clean this crap up? I mean, the smell.” She pinches her nose.

I sniff and I don’t really smell anything anymore. I must have gotten used to it. Is that a bad sign? Does that mean I smell too, and I don’t even notice anymore? I resist the urge to check my underarms.

“Ugh,” I say. “Cleaning? Really? Worst summer ever.”

She gives me that inimitable Aisha smile that engulfs her whole face and says, “Well, you’ve obviously never cleaned with Aisha before….” She does a spin and a little jump, and I watch her, wondering where the hell this is going. She stops with her arms out wide, facing me. “Sorry, I got nothing,” she says. “Can you take care of the boxes? I’d rather scrub floors than deal with boxes that have been gathering spiderwebs for decades. That freaks me out.”

After we do our morning stuff, we get to work. The boxes are, in fact, covered in cobwebs. Some have been numbered with orange Magic Marker – a “1,” a “3,” and a “4.” Some are damp on the bottom, like maybe there was a flood, and I imagine a box with an orange “2” on it floating down a river. When I lift “3” off the pile, it feels soggy on the bottom and begins to collapse into itself. I wrestle that one safely down to the ground and open it.

The box is filled with old photo albums. It’s pretty clear to me that this is my grandmother’s stuff, and that my father must have decided, upon moving in seven years ago, that everything should be put away and tended to at a future date that never quite arrived.

The top one is a wedding album. I flip through and the photos are all black and white – more like black and yellow, really – and the setting is some sort of banquet hall, in some town where smiling was illegal or at least really frowned upon. Of the posed shots, not a single one is even a little bit joyful. A few show strangers on the dance floor having maybe a moderate amount of fun. In one shot, my grandfather appears to be smiling as he dances with my grandmother, but she’s glowering up at him. When I get married, I probably won’t keep any of the glowering shots.

My grandfather looks even more like me than my dad does, which is weird because he’s, like, a missing person. His face is long and thin like mine. My dad, with his rounder face, looks a lot more like my grandmother.

“I wonder how long these have been here,” I say, closing the box and then placing another on top of it. Aisha doesn’t respond. She’s busy scrubbing a dirt stain off the carpet near the stairs.

I open another soggy box – the one marked with the “4.” Unlabeled folders are stacked on one side, and on the other, random trinkets have been tossed in together. I pick out a wooden cross with peeling green paint, a lone turquoise earring that appears to be rusted, and a jewelry box. Inside the jewelry box are four baby teeth. Someone has written, on a small piece of paper thrown into the box, “Matthew’s first teeth, 1971.”

“If you were wondering where my father’s baby teeth are, I found ’em,” I say.

Aisha laughs. “Mystery solved.”

“You think there’s a good baby teeth market on eBay?”

“Probably Craigslist,” she says.

I grab one of the files, sit down, and open it up. The front page is stuck to the file, and as I pull it back, I can see that blue and black ink has tattooed the inside of the folder itself, creating blurred backward words, unreadable. The top page of paper is illegible, and a few more pages are stuck to it. Some of the inside pages are readable, though, and I flip to a form called “Petition for Dissolution of Marriage with Children.”

“More workin’, less sittin’,” Aisha calls over.

I ignore her and turn through to the final page, and there, under the title “Petitioner,” is my grandmother’s name, Phyllis Helen Smith, and her gritty, harsh signature.

Across from it, under the title “Respondent,” is my grandfather’s name, Russell Alan Smith. In his more animated autograph, the letters seem to be battling for attention.

There is also a witness’s signature: John Francis Logan. Everyone’s favorite pastor slash neighbor. The date is listed as May 23, 1983.

I’d never heard anything about my grandparents getting a divorce. I mean, according to my mom, my grandfather just up and left one day, never to be heard from again. I guess not. I wonder if my dad knew that they were having trouble, and that they had gotten divorced?

I riffle through the trinkets. Other than the baby teeth, most of the stuff is religious – crosses, a little round thumbnail picture of blond Jesus on a silver necklace, a cracked picture frame with an embroidered angel inside bearing the phrase, “With God all things are possible.”

I roll my eyes. Yes. All things. Like happy marriages and well-raised children. All possible.