Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “Could you check if Mittler’s in there?”

  I think what was happening now was Chet was swooning. The skin on his face, a little viridian to begin with, turned green. His eyelids fluttered—have you noticed it’s the boys of the world who are naturally gifted with long eyelashes? He fell against the wall, which thumped a short gust of air from him. He leaned in a little twilight of dysentery. The way he practiced it, dysentery looked calm and voluptuous. The wall of the building was covered with guerrilla posters. The ambiguous poster Chet leaned on showed a man who, as best I could tell, had two anuses.

  I put my hand in Chet’s damp, sticky pants pocket and retrieved a key. I draped one of Chet’s wan arms over my shoulders and opened the shrieking door of the condemned building. A person appeared on the landing who was basically the female Chet. The female Chet may or may not have had dysentery but resembled Chet and had, for all intents and purposes, the same hair as Chet and the same unwashed body as Chet enshrouded in the same limp garments as Chet’s. I said, “I am helping Chet.”

  “Put him on the bottom stair,” she directed from the landing. I did, and there we all were for a moment: Chet crumpled on the bottom stair; lady Chet in the dim light on the top stair, hands on hips, ethereal and thin; and I, wondering how much energy it would take to get past lady Chet. I moved first, slowly. The girl stared at me, swaying slightly; her eyes did not protrude so much as her face receded on all sides of her eyes. I stopped one stair below her. “No guests unaccompanied by a resident,” she recited, as if in a trance.

  “I want to see Mittler.”

  “Not here.”

  “I want to leave him a note.”

  “No guests unaccompanied.”

  “So accompany me.”

  “But Chet,” the girl said sadly, pointing to the crumpled body.

  “I have to go past you now.”

  “Don’t.”

  I went past her. She didn’t move. I continued on up the stairs. She shrieked, less like a girl than a door.

  I walked down the hallway toward the room that contained Mittler’s orange tent. I almost did not see the shadow at my side. Then I felt my ribs being crushed. My head bounced against something hard—the wall. I thought of my parents and I saw them out on the highway being crushed by a truck. They were small and innocent. I saw them, the woman and the man, and then I did not see them and I could not remember them. Now something was trying to flatten my windpipe against the wall, like the windpipes of the children who went to the planet that existed in only two dimensions in A Wrinkle in Time, a book that was read to me once a long time ago by Jane Building, the first teacher I had after my parents died. I brought my knee up fast and got Mittler right in the testes. He let go my throat. I stood against the wall gasping for air while he lay on the floor curled up in a tight ball like a sow bug. He was not breathing, but the name of God kept oozing out his mouth in a soft whisper.

  After a while he sat up and said, “I made you a hat.”

  “Oh, no, you did? What kind of a hat?”

  “Well, a Gore-Tex rain hat. A cap, I would say. But now your hair’s a different color so I don’t know.”

  My hair was half-and-half hair at that point. “I hate my hair.”

  “Me too. The cap is blue. The hat. It’s waterproof and has a brim to keep the water off your face.”

  “I like the water on my face.”

  “How was I supposed to know that? Ah, shit, I screwed up.” He looked disconsolate.

  “Mittler, you’re funny.”

  “Are you being mean again?”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no.” I felt fiercely tender toward him because he had attacked me in the hall and because of the hat. I wanted to touch him but I knew he wouldn’t want me to. “Maybe I don’t really want the water on my face,” I said.

  “Would you like to see the hat now?”

  “Yes.”

  The air in his tent had a fresh citrus smell that was a tribute to Mittler’s scrupulous cleanliness. “Did you make orange-flavored tea?” I said.

  “I’m not ever making tea when you’re around.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “This is the nontoxic orange pekoe air freshener which does not deplete the ozone.”

  “What’s the ozone?”

  “What have you been, raised by dogs?”

  “I think you know who I’ve been raised by.”

  “Now you’re making me mean.”

  “Fine, I’ll leave.” Walking away down Second Street, I heard my name. I turned around. Mittler was leaning out a window holding the hat. “Your hat!”

  “Throw it down!”

  “Come up and get it!”

  “Take back what you said!”

  “I take it back!”

  Mittler was making tea when I returned. “Just stay away from the damned stove.”

  I wanted to express my gratitude for the tea. I know a lot of people can express gratitude by talking, and in this way the recipient of the gratitude does not feel violated by the gratitude. But there is a certain kind of gratitude that I feel that is like an electrical current that makes it impossible for me to speak, and it becomes almost mandatory that I move quickly through space and hug someone or scream or bite or kick or tackle someone or fuck them. Instead, I squatted in the corner of Mittler’s tent, shaking. I didn’t ask to see the hat, even. Reader, this is one of those times when I wish you or I could reach back in time and give a pat on the back to that frantic little teenage girl for being so careful with that teenage boy’s feelings.

  He gave me the tea. It was chamomile. He said it would calm me down because Mittler was an observant friend and kind and considerate. Chamomile tea is some kind of unnatural abomination. Whoever invented chamomile must really have been out of ideas. It is tea made from powdered cat vomit, I think.

  Mittler gave me the hat. It was a baseball cap, dark blue, a little boxy, rough-hewn. I put it on. I was still shaking.

  “Do you need more tea?”

  “No thank you.”

  My ribs ached and the left side of my head throbbed where he had bounced it off the wall. I could not control my heart or lungs. He adjusted the brim of the cap on my head. When he did this, I did not reach up and touch his hand. “It looks cute on you. I wish I could have made a little bit better of a hat.”

  “It’s nice.”

  “Do you want to go to Staten Island? I know a skiff there that we could take out into the harbor and harvest oysters which are a natural food resource of the area.”

  I shook my head. I was frozen to the spot.

  “You’re perspiring heavily,” he said. “I’ll take the hat off you.” He took it off. “May I mop your brow with a clean chamois cloth?” he said. I nodded. He wiped my face with the soft cloth. “Your neck is very—what?—white and, uh, damp. Should I daub your neck as well?” I nodded. He daubed my neck. “You have thermal underwear on?” he said. I nodded. “It’s not like I’m saying ‘take off your pants,’ but it’s just I notice you’re sweating so maybe you should—oh, God, I know this doesn’t sound right—undress a little.”

  He helped me with my jacket and boots and pants and thermal underwear. He said, “Now I’m seeing that you’re sweating but also shaking and I’m thinking I could ask you to lie on the floor and then with certain techniques I’ve learned in workshops and books I could realign the polarity of the energy field of your body, so is that something I could ask you to do, lie on the floor and I polarize?” I nodded. “Do you want me to help you lie on the floor?” I nodded. He held the back of my head the way you hold the heads of newborn babies, which will virtually fall off if you don’t hold them. I lay on the floor and he held his arms out over my body like someone playing a zombie in a movie. He moved his two parallel arms low down along the length of my body. “You’re very very very tense,” he said. He placed a hand on my forehead and one on my belly. Inside my mouth was my bloody tongue. His hands made a small circular motion in my flesh. “You’re resisting. I
can feel it,” he said. He made the circles for a while longer and suddenly got to his feet. “Ah, shit, I can’t do this. I don’t know what I’m doing.” He was very upset. “You’re a mess,” he said. “Look at your hair.” He picked some of my hair up off the tent floor and held it in his hand to scorn it. He gathered all my loose hair up into his hands. He touched my head with his fingers. He was not polarizing me anymore, he was touching me. He touched my mouth with his fingers, and then with his mouth, and that was our first kiss. I fell into a Chetlike swoon, and I cannot remember exactly what happened next.

  Hours later, not having emerged fully from the swoon, I could not figure out my place in the world. By place in the world I mean whose house I was supposed to stay at now.

  Once I was wide awake, I figured it out. In fact, it turned out to be not that hard to figure out. I chose the place with the luxury furniture.

  While sleeping on the luxury furniture over the next few weeks, I often dreamt of Mittler. In my dreams he was someone who only crushed me. No tea, no hats, no polarity massage. Just crushing me in the hallway. I cherished him for it. If someone loves you only as a thing to be crushed, who’s to say that’s not loving?

  Each morning during that period, Skip had some new set of comments or questions. “I can see why it is that you feel such a strong affinity for an American male,” she said one morning.

  “Why?”

  “You are practically one yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that it is the legacy and birthright of the American male to love a person, all the while wishing that person were someone else.”

  “What makes you an expert on the subject?”

  “It is a form of self-deception, you know.”

  “What is?”

  “Never mind.”

  On another morning she said, “Your actions do not destroy me. I will survive this. You will see, and you will be grateful. I trust you.”

  “What if I leave you for him?”

  “I’ll still trust you.”

  On another morning she actually said, “What has he got that I haven’t got?”

  “A penis.”

  “Seriously.”

  “He’s surprising.”

  “Surprising.”

  “He’s devoted to me but he’s also his own man.”

  “I hate when you don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know what own means. You don’t know what man means.”

  “He gives me nice things and makes me feel good. Then, when I want to go, he lets me go. If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you it is yours. If it doesn’t come back, it never was.”

  “Oh, please God tell me she did not just say that. I thought we had pulled you out of the public schools before you’d been exposed to that horrifying aphorism.”

  “Well, he’s surprising, which you still didn’t answer.”

  “Please. He is surprising in exactly the same bland way all young men are surprising.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I experimented. And I paid the price for it, as you will.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “You’re not scaring me, you know.”

  “Fine.”

  “Anyway, Mittler’s not just surprising. He’s also exciting.”

  “Well, that’s different. I see your point there. Exciting. I cannot compete with that. God forbid twenty-four hours should pass in which someone has not excited you. You must be made to feel unrelenting pleasure all day every day. One must devote one’s energies to providing constant stimulation for you. One must give up one’s very life so that all experience for you will be one long coitus.”

  10 My Body Writes Checks My Mind Can’t Cash

  The field hockey mallet I stole from Uncle Tommy got him into a little bit of trouble. I mean his attitude toward the field hockey mallet theft did. He thought he wasn’t well liked in Marmot, and while that was true, he also thought Marmot had broken into his house as one single Marmot entity and stolen his decorative field hockey mallet from the wall of his kitchen. “Marmot thinks it can play with the head of its electronics repairman,” was the way he put it on the phone to Skip Hartman, who in turn put it that way to me. But Tommy was not the rube or dupe that Marmot expected him to be. He would not be subjugated, or even friendly. He painted his front door and shutters bright red. He channeled his energy. He slept all day and roamed the streets of Marmot at night on foot, unshaven in his cape. He antagonized the local boys who worked at the Marmot Food Mart. He rarely opened his downtown repair shop for business, and people whose broken stereos he had in the shop could not get them back from him, and that was their own damn fault for being complicit in the mallet abscondence. He was fined for the red door and he did not pay the fine and he did not repaint the door. He became a prominent citizen. In the middle of May, two officers of the law came to the red door. He punched one of them and went to jail where he was treated, not so nicely, for his hurt hand.

  Skip Hartman drove up to bail him out. She made me go with her. We reached the gate and the squared-off young man with the small wad of phallic muscle in his lower face refused to let us through. Skip handed him five twenty-dollar bills and he let us through. We stopped by the house to ask Myra for directions to the police station. Myra had not bailed Tommy out herself because she had been out shopping when Tommy punched the officer, and when he had tried to call her from the police station he kept getting the machine, as they say.

  We knocked on the front door, which Marmot had now whitewashed. No answer. We went around back and found Myra in a long folding chair on the deck.

  I said, “Myra, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Thinking about my garden.”

  “Hi, it’s me, your niece.”

  “Hi.”

  “Tommy’s in jail.” I watched her face, and there I saw the same look of generalized perturbation that I had seen on the day the grounds manager caught Paul and me sleeping in a hole in the first green. Then the look disappeared, not into the air but down into that body that was so full of bad feeling I wondered when it was going to burst.

  “I knew he was gone for a long time. He likes to wander around,” she said.

  “Myra, did you just hear me? I said he’s in jail.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you an automaton?” One tear leaked out of her body, followed by another.

  Skip said, “He remarked that he has been trying to call you on the telephone from jail.”

  Myra looked at her.

  “Have you heard the phone ring?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you answer it?”

  “I don’t like to answer the phone.”

  I looked down at the place in the yard where the garden ought to have been. The soil was gray and dry and covered in spots with clover and grass. A few long brown stalks of things lay on their sides.

  “You haven’t been gardening.”

  “I’ve been thinking of it.”

  Skip said, “Tell her we must go to the police station to post bail on her husband.”

  I said, “Who do I look like, Doctor Dolittle? You tell her.”

  “Myra, can you tell us how to get to the police station by car?” Skip said.

  Nothing.

  “It’s the solemnity I hate,” Skip Hartman said that evening in the White living room.

  “Yeah, the solemnity,” Tommy said.

  “Solemnity!” I said.

  “So they jailed you because you punched an officer. Fine. But the worst part of it is the way they attempted to infantilize you.”

  “No, actually being strip-searched was the worst part,” Tommy said.

  I said, “I think the worst part in all this would be being Myra, right, My-my?” She looked at me. I said, “Say something, say something.”

  “I’ll get some finger food,” she said.
r />   “That’s not what I meant! I meant respond to the situation, you fucking piece of meat!” (I can see now that perhaps I was being too hard on her.)

  “Right back,” she said, meaning, I’ll be right back. She walked toward the kitchen. I leapt up and blocked her way. I put my hands on her shoulders and leaned into her. Her shoulders felt bulky and firm. She had a naturally low center of gravity and kept moving forward. I slid backward in my socks on the polished oaken floor of the living room.

  “Say something say something say something say something.”

  Myra paused and scowled at me. I mean that her eyebrows went up and the ends of her mouth went down so that her lips formed two pale pink crescents that sandwiched a black crescent. Her face lost suppleness and looked like a hard plastic child’s Halloween mask. Myra fell on the floor and twitched. Her eyes closed and she was still. Tommy screamed and rushed to her. Skip Hartman called an ambulance. The ambulance took Myra to the Marmot Medical Center, where she was treated for a stroke.

  Reader, now don’t be cruel and think, How can you tell the difference between Myra before a stroke and Myra after a stroke? The difference was that she needed someone to take care of her in the most basic way, which Tommy could not do. He could not do it because during his assault trial he lost control and slapped the prosecuting attorney. The judge indicted him on the spot for assault and declared a mistrial. For the next four months Tommy lived in the Marmot town jail. Skip Hartman moved up to Marmot to care for Myra White.

  Skip Hartman’s move was a boon to me in terms of not having to sneak rendezvous with Mittler. Still, if her move seemed to say to me, “You don’t have to sneak rendezvous with Mittler,” it also seemed to say, “However, you will pay a price.” But her move, being a move and not, say, a tearstained five-page letter written to me in anguish on her first night alone with my thrombotic aunt in Marmot, did not specify what that price would be. After all, there were prices everywhere, and I was an adolescent without fiscal savvy. Even now I am in capitalism but not of it.

  Mittler offered me love that was tender and hard and angry and fair. With the advent of the warm weather, he folded up his indoor tent and suspended a hammock from hooks he had secured in the crumbling walls of the room in the condemned building. He made me sleep with him in the hammock. It was not at all comfortable.