Nothing Is Terrible Page 19

  Mildred reached into a bright Guatemalan satchel. I started to cry and spilled my tea. “What’s the matter?” Mildred said.

  “It’s Christmas and you’re giving me a present,” I said.

  “Aw, shut up, you little twat,” Chetty said gently, and stroked my hair with his dirty fingers. “Of course you get a present. Everyone here gets one. Besides, Mittler loves you. Besides that, you amuse us.”

  Mildred held out a small sheet of white paper perforated into segments that looked like postage stamps, only half the size and without pictures on them. Mittler put the gun on the ground, carefully tore off four squares of the paper, and handed one to each of us. Mildred undulated down into a sitting position next to Chetty at the back of the tent. “Do you know what this is?” she asked me. She was excited like a thin puppy.

  Chetty said, “I bet she doesn’t know. She was raised by Republicans.”

  “Put it in your mouth but don’t swallow it,” Mildred said.

  I looked at Mittler, who balanced his square on the tip of his index finger. “Couldn’t hurt at this point,” he said, and popped it in his mouth.

  Chetty and Mildred looked at each other and stuck out their tongues. Chetty placed his square on Mildred’s tongue and Mildred placed her square on Chetty’s tongue. “Merry Christmas,” they said. They leaned close and touched cracked lips. Mittler raised his eyebrows at me.

  “What’s gonna happen?” I asked.

  “Stuff that’s never happened before,” Mildred said.

  “Make it new,” Chetty said.

  I put the square in my mouth.

  Mildred and Chetty helped one another to their bony feet. “We’ll be back. We’re going dancing in the snow.”

  “There is no snow,” I said.

  “She’s so literal,” Chetty said, and left with Mildred.

  “Now what do we do?” I asked Mittler.

  “I’m going to puncture my mouth.”

  “What about me?”

  “You want your mouth punctured?”

  “No.”

  “Then wait.”

  “I’ve been waiting my whole life. I’m sick of it.”

  “So read.”

  “Reading is waiting.”

  I opened up Pride and Prejudice. I love, love, love Jane Austen’s understatement. “Dirty stockings and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise,” only Jane could have said. I haven’t seen a picture, but that Jane must have been ferociously plain. Only someone with—I don’t know—let’s say two radically different-sized nostrils would be careful to write such symmetrical sentences as she did. On the other hand, it is the luxury of the gorgeous to write sentences that look and sound and are amorphous and shitty. Witness the present account.

  As Elizabeth Bennett reached Pemberley Wood, I became aware of each atom that composed my face vibrating in a fixed position and told Mittler about it. He moaned. He was curled up in a tight ball on the floor, grimacing. I asked him what he was doing.

  “Holding myself in.”

  I wished he hadn’t said that because my atoms broke away from their fixed positions and my face kind of went out all over the tent. “Mittler, what was on those little white squares?”

  “Atoms.”

  “Did you make a hole in your head yet?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then a giant universal being would stick a straw in my head and suck out my brain.”

  “Could we talk about something more normal, please?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay, first I have to wrap this towel around my face.” I wrapped a towel tightly around my skull in the face area and couldn’t breathe so I unwrapped it. Then I jammed my fists into my eye sockets. That seemed to help some.

  “So, Mittler.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How was school today?”

  “Good.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “Fractals.”

  “What are fractals?”

  “They’re when all things in the universe get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until everything is nothing and vice versa.”

  “Maybe we should have sex.”

  “No!”

  “What should we do?”

  “Put my sleeping bag on top of me and then jump up and down on it.”

  I did that for a few minutes.

  “Oh, that’s much better,” he said. “You want me to do it to you?”

  “Yeah, but walk, don’t jump.”

  He walked on my legs and butt and back with his soft padded feet. Mittler’s a good walker.

  “Maybe we should kiss a little,” he said, pointing the gun at me.

  “What are you going to do if I say no, pierce my navel?”

  For a time, then, we sat side by side and kissed in a pleasant, soothing fashion. Because my eyes were closed, I didn’t see Mittler bring the gun to our mouths, but I heard a soft pop and felt a pinprick in my top lip. As I tried to jerk my head away he grabbed the back of my head and held it in place.

  “Don’t move,” he said. His words came out distorted, and when he spoke I felt a sharp pain in my lip.

  “Huh?” I felt the pain when I spoke, too.

  “Stay still.”

  “What happened?” I said, or tried to say, but something prevented me from making the w and p sounds.

  “I locked us together.”

  “What?”

  “We are wearing one lip ring between the two of us,” he said, but because it sounded as if he were saying “Ee are airing un lyring eating the ooh uh us,” and because an hour ago I had eaten a piece of paper with very strong LSD on it for the first time ever, I didn’t have a clear sense of what was happening.

  Mittler leaned back, pulling me down over him; that was the easiest way for him to reach the hand mirror in the corner of the tent by the door. He held up the mirror so I could see how we were connected.

  I said, “Great. Did you do this on purpose?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I guess.”

  “Now I can’t leave you without ripping your face open.”

  “So how is that different from before?”

  Mittler lay on his back and I lay facedown on him. I did not allow my face to rest fully on his face because the lip ring would have sliced into our upper gums. I held my head so that the tips of our noses were lightly touching and my hair, hanging down, enclosed the top and side perimeters of his face. He rotated his body clockwise until he lay on his right side and I lay on my left. We remained face-to-face, tripping on acid, and helped each other learn to talk. We took turns saying things because we did not yet know how to speak at the same time. We practiced English word pronunciation. We timed our breathing so that he would not inhale my exhalations and vice versa, but then sometimes we laughed so hard that we coughed into each other’s mouths. We rested. I repeatedly felt a kind of ultra-sensation begin on the bottoms of my feet, surge up my body, and shoot out the top of my head, as if a giant pastry chef were pressing me out with a low-voltage rolling pin.

  Time passed. The tent walls grew dim and we saw elongated shadows of football-player-sized cats and dogs hanging low in the sky above Houston Street and whipping each other with flexible bamboo rods.

  “You’re squeezing my pelvic bone very hard,” Mittler said.

  This was the most fun I could remember having, ever.

  In the morning, Mildred and Chetty came back to the tent with dilated pupils. They put fresh squares of LSD-soaked paper in our mouths. They did not ask how or why a single gold ring had punctured one of each of our lips, nor did they seem to notice that that was the case.

  Mildred said, “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it!” and raced around and around the tent screaming. She tore a clump or two of hair from her head before Chetty reached her and, holding her with his frail arms, pinned her even frailer ones down to her sides. “I’m standing it, I’m standing it,” Mildred said.

  They left. Mittle
r closed his eyes and began to age very quickly. His skull and all the bones of his arms and legs shrank while his skin remained the same size. All the ripe boy skin drooped off his little frame. He looked very unhappy and he didn’t have to tell me I was the cause of his unhappiness. His upper lip became so droopy that he was able to stand up and move around the tent while staying attached to me by a long, limp putty-length of lip. He did a little soft-shoe dance and his long-lipped grin communicated a thousand regrets. He sang me this song:

  “A fine romance with you, bitch, is

  A long tap dance in Hell, which is

  Better than a metal-toe kick in the teeth.

  I like it when you’re on top

  But not when I’m underneath.

  “A fine romance, with no fucking,

  A fine romance. With this lip ring,

  If we tried to fuck you would rip off my face.

  To love is to self-erase.

  I’d rather be sprayed with Mace.

  “A fine romance, my good woman,

  My gal with a dick with a foreskin hood, woman.

  You never give the poems I write you a chance.

  You steal them for Miss Fancy Pants.

  This is a fine romance.”

  “Mittler cut it out, you’re giving me the creeps.”

  “What?”

  “Stop singing!”

  “Who’s singing? I was asleep.”

  “So who was singing?”

  “I don’t know. I dreamt I was a diseased elm tree.”

  “Mittler, can you really go to sleep on this drug? I’m so tired but I can’t sleep.”

  “There’s a trick to it. First, relax your tongue.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean shut up.”

  “Oh.”

  “Also, let your tongue lean against the inside wall of your mouth.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “Well, if you’re saying ‘Okay, then what?’ you’re not doing it. Are you doing it now?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’re saying ‘Yes’ then you’re not—”

  “Mittler!”

  “Okay, after you relax your tongue, count backward from a million.”

  “One million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-six, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-five, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-four, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-three—”

  “Count in your head.”

  “I am counting in my head.”

  “Count in the part of your head that isn’t your mouth.”

  I was down in the mid-nine hundred thousands when Paul entered the room. He was imperially thin and arrayed in pajamas of light. I rolled onto my back to look at him, dragging Mittler, who, asleep, had become a loose, soft, malleable fillet. Lying on my back, I gazed directly into the wide-open nostrils of yore, the gently veined inner nostrils of my twin baby brother, just as I remembered them. There above me was the familiar sneer of the face of my kin, the overall cruelty; there was the tall forehead, the translucent, squeezable gullet, the skull-encrusted brain; and there, the enormous sadness of his own diminutive self, attached like a misguided deer tick to the gross but bloodless body of infinity.

  “You!” he said, pointing a bony finger of light.

  I lay accused.

  “You have forgotten me,” he said.

  “No I haven’t. You’ve forgotten me.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Don’t you.”

  “Admit that you have not thought of me even once in years,” Paul said.

  “I think of you all the time, just not consciously.”

  “You never think of me.”

  “You already said that.”

  “I taught you how to think, and you forgot.”

  “I don’t want to think like you and you can’t make me.”

  “You killed me. Now honor me.”

  “How?”

  “Honor me.”

  “Do all dead people just repeat themselves?”

  “That is the job of the dead.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “Perfect example.”

  “How am I supposed to honor you?”

  “Kill him, just like you killed me.”

  Dread surged into my body like a stronger drug than the one I had voluntarily taken. “No.” I started to cry.

  “Make the harder choice, as I taught you. Kill the boy you’re sleeping with. Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill kill.”

  I screamed, and the abrupt change in the shape of my mouth woke Mittler. “Okay, honey, you’re having a bad trip.” Paul stood above us shaking his head.

  “What’s a bad trip?”

  “It’s when you see something you shouldn’t have to see.”

  “What should I do?”

  Mittler held my head in place against his and rolled us one over the other until he could reach his camping stove and collapsible cooking pot. “I’ll make us mugwort tea.”

  “Okay.”

  Paul walked out of the tent, staring at me, bearing the tedious nostalgia that only someone who had once been alive could feel.

  We drank the tea all morning and into the afternoon, and had to pee. “Why don’t we run a catheter from my bladder directly into your bladder,” I said. He said ha ha ha and wondered if I would give the sarcasm a rest for just one moment of one day of my entire life. We went to the receptacle that served as a toilet in Mittler’s building. It’s hard not to get splashed by urine, reader, if the person whose lip your lip is stuck to is peeing into a bucket. We needed several days to figure out how not to get splashed, and the same amount of time to figure out how to eat without hurting one another’s mouths. In fact, anything other than lying still required at least several days’ practice, and even after that, careful planning and cooperative execution. We lay still for much of the time. I read to him from Pride and Prejudice. He read to me from the diaries of John Muir. We found it helpful to continue taking LSD once or twice a day.

  Childhood friends Dierdre and Harry showed up, slumming for drugs. Harry had obtained an American motorcycle and an electric guitar and was fat. The guitar, because Harry was fat and also tall, seemed distant, resting high up near his neck. Harry himself seemed distant, literally and figuratively above us, semi-interested at most in the weather down there, least interested of all in his girlfriend, Dierdre. Harry at rest in the center of the Mittlerian tent with leather pockets full of beef jerky and apple-mint sucking candies was like a lazy Susan of record-breaking size around which no diner could comfortably maneuver. When Harry sat around the tent, Mittler and I had to sit on the tip of a foot or hand belonging to him, or at the distant edge of one of the fatty extensions of his person. Thin, tiny Dierdre sat curled in the aerie of his lap. We passed squares of drugged paper up to Dierdre and she tossed the paper farther up toward his mouth. To watch Dierdre do this was like watching a little girl throw a paper airplane through the doorway of a cathedral.

  Dierdre didn’t seem to be doing so well. This was evident in the state of her freckles. No freckle had changed shape or size or position or color; she did not possess more freckles or fewer freckles, and yet each freckle had been—sullied is the word I want to use. I do not recall observing any other sign of her discontent than those downgraded freckles. Her sternum was its bony, pale self, as was the rippled skin stretched across her upper ribs, as were the lovely nipples pointing faithfully forward beneath her white scoop-neck T-shirt. Her same obnoxious talk did not betray an increased dissatisfaction with life. Just the freckles.

  “It’s usually so clean in here,” Dierdre said. “What happened? You don’t wash anymore? You don’t do laundry?”


  “No,” Mittler and I said, our upper lips forming a small tent above our lower lips.

  “Maybe you should hire a cleaning lady,” she said. “Maybe Skip Hartman could clean for you.”

  “Very funny,” we said, because one of the methods we had developed for not tearing each other’s mouths open was to think the same thoughts and say the same words at the same time.

  “What’s funny to me,” Dierdre continued, in the same vein, “is how you’re like this idealist guy, Mittler, with your shared lip ring and your housing rights and your East Village squatter community, but you can’t clean your room. You two look ridiculous, by the way, and you smell bad.”

  I said, “You are so fucking—”

  “—obnoxious,” Mittler said. “You have not changed—” he said.

  “—in the least,” I said. “You are no different—” I added.

  “—than you were in the sixth grade,” he completed. “Obnoxious—” he said.

  “—right out of the womb,” I said.

  “An obnoxious seed,” he said.

  “A burden on your parents,” I said.

  “And on all who know you,” he said.

  “Unwanted,” I said.

  “Unloved,” he said. “And yet spoiled—” he said.

  “—rotten,” I said.

  Dierdre didn’t just cry. She wailed. She stood up and ran out of the tent. We heard her footsteps going down the stairs. We heard the loud screech of the metal door scraping open against the concrete floor, another screech, and a slam. We had vanquished Dierdre. We had pummeled her, pulverized her. We took more LSD.

  “Look, it’s the two-headed monster,” Harry pronounced from atop the Parnassian height of his body.

  Mittler said, “Wow, we were really mean. How the hell’d that happen?”