Nothing Is Terrible Read online

  “Our hostility—” I said.

  “—is greater than the sum of its parts,” he said.

  Harry said, “Dierdre got raped.”

  “What?”

  “She got raped and she’s fragile and you two just broke her,” he said, as if reciting something he’d rehearsed many times and didn’t care about. This was a different Harry from the one I remembered, if what I remembered makes any difference. This one was articulate and bored. He still had that same head on him—curly thin yellowed beard, gray skin, bags under the eyes—only the entire head itself had expanded to the size of a pumpkin. “Dierdre got raped in a cabin on an island off the coast of Maine. It was her own damn fault. I can’t love her anymore. Don’t know how to tell her.”

  “Cruel giant,” Mittler said.

  I said, “Tell us what happened.”

  “Oh, her and me were riding up the coast on my Harley at the end of the summer and we got in a big fight and she told me to go away and die so I left her in the parking lot of this bar on the Maine coast. She went in the bar and there was this skinny little drunk boy who talked to her and she worked that kind of reverse charm on him, you know? Where she says mean things to you for an hour nonstop until you feel so battered you just want to hug her really tight?” Harry said, as if all this were the oldest and most uninteresting thing a person could ever waste his time saying. “So she sour-talks him into letting her stay at his shack—all these people have shacks up there and they marry their sisters and whatnot—only she says he has to not touch her the whole night or else her big boyfriend who rides a Harley will beat the crap out of him and probably dismember his dick—by which she meant me, like I’m gonna really tangle with some inbred New England serial killer–looking guy over her.

  “So the guy lets her stay at his shack and she wakes up at ten A.M. and the guy is standing in the doorway of his shack, he’s been awake for hours, out hunting beaver skins or lobsters or whatever they hunt up there, and he presents her with beaver-skin gifts or whatever, and some flowers, and says no girl ever made him treat her like a lady and it makes him feel real classy and would she like to take a ride out to a deserted island on his outboard.”

  Harry’s eyes were half closed and I honestly thought he was going to fall asleep in the middle of his own story.

  “So the forest-geek boy takes my girl out to this island and I guess she’s thinking, Here’s a boy who’s real nice to me and treats me like a lady, unlike that fat fuck of a Harley-riding boyfriend, who practically ignores me every second. So they come up onto the beach, she gets out of the boat, and he punches her really hard in the face, over and over, and takes her to a shack and does stuff—” Mittler and I saw a big pulse work its way up the huge body of Harry and come out his mouth as a small, high noise, a prolonged squeak. “’Eeeeeeee does stuff to my nice girl that she won’t even say what he did cause it was so bad and she won’t ever be all right, you know? The guy left her in the shack and he didn’t care what happened. She crawled down to the beach and the Coast Guard saw her. That guy, he hurt her for all time, you know?” Harry was so big and sad now. This giant person being sad in our tent, shaking, squealing softly with unhappiness. “He hurt her all the way for the whole thing until she lies down and dies somewhere, guys. How can that happen? Now my whole life sucks too ’cause I love her and I don’t even want to anymore. I can’t help it. You know, guys? Everything is bad now forever and I hate her and I’m gonna marry her.”

  Harry sighed. His mass resettled. He quieted. Only a slight tremor of his flesh persisted, causing the orange cloth walls of the tent to billow. Mittler and I caressed his flanks, soothing him.

  “You guys are nice,” he said, sounding indifferent again.

  “Play us a song on your guitar,” Mittler said.

  “Don’t feel like it.”

  “Try,” Mittler said.

  Harry fiddled with the guitar strap, which, wrapped around his neck, looked like a piece of dental floss wrapped around a sequoia. He lowered the guitar to the height of his voluminous breasts. He removed a small electric amp from an inside pocket of his leather jacket, plugged it in, and strummed. He sighed again, played some chords, and mumbled some words off-key that sounded like “Living on the streets with all the petty people” and “You used to get juiced in the head” and “You used to be so abused” and “You used to ride on the chrome horse with your boy who’s fat” and “You got some secrets to conceeeee-uhl” and a bunch of other things I couldn’t make out.

  Dierdre, who must have been drawn toward the sound of her own life being sung by the one who knew it best, returned to us. There was a thick red line running horizontally across her face—her mouth—with the shape of which she was trying to tell us something about how she felt. She felt bad. And by pressing her lips together she was saying she would try to keep all that badness contained inside her in our presence, and by the way she held her shoulders so stiffly and carefully she was asking us to be very gentle with her, and we were. Harry sat in a grand, glazed stupor. Mittler and I picked up Dierdre and held her in our arms as one would hold a small child who has fallen from her bicycle. We raised her up above our heads and laid her to sleep on the soft, rounded shelf of flesh where Harry’s breast ended and his belly began.

  The sky outside the window outside the tent had been dark for hours. Mittler and I ate a bedtime snack of LSD and with our hands we described garish-colored, violent paintings in the air before falling asleep.

  Sometime in the night, I looked up and saw Dierdre darkly glowing, her small body a collapsed firmament. For a while I lay with dozing Mittler in the lowest foothills of Harry and gazed up at Dierdre’s twinkling freckles. Then I undertook a journey to her. Out of a large T-shirt, I fashioned a frontal pouch in which to carry the sleeping body of Mittler while I climbed the lower slopes of Harry. I attached a rope to Harry’s thigh and climbed up his leg. I trekked his hip and the lunar arc of his belly. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I cast off from the edge of Harry’s breast and made my ascent of the body of Dierdre, one of the roughs, a cosmos: for days, I traveled those degraded heavens. I roamed the unhappy constellations of her limbs. I traversed deserts of scar tissue, barren and desolate. I stopped to rest and drink at great salt lakes of sweat. When I approached a terrible bright freckle, I positioned Mittler in front of my eyes, making of his head an eclipse from behind which to look without going blind. I reached my destination, the abandoned planet of her cunt. There I found ravages. I went spelunking in a strip-mined outer crevice of her labia. I scaled and descended the steep, wasted folds. Holding the length of Mittler’s body perpendicular to my own, I thus maintained my balance on the soft and treacherous footing of the ridge high over the abyss of her vagina. I had arrived at the point in the journey, reader, where the traveler wishes she had not left home. I regretted my terrible decision to take this trip. I was afraid I would lose myself in the place where she had been made to die. I woke Mittler and made him carry me away from the dark red cavern that held in the memory of its walls more violence than time and forgetting could erode. Mittler carried me safely back to the tent floor and I fell asleep, shivering, sad, feeling the most gentle tenderness toward Dierdre and doubting I could make my feelings the least bit useful to her.

  A few days after Dierdre and Harry left the tent, we discovered that Harry had left behind all the beef jerky and apple-mint sucking candies he had been holding in the pockets of his pants, shirt, and jacket, which was a considerable amount of food. It was early or mid- or late January. Mittler and I, who had not eaten solid food since Christmas Eve, ate beef jerky and apple-mint sucking candies for the next twenty-four hours, and drank our usual mugs of herbal tea. We were both by now growing acne and skin rashes. It could be said that acne and skin rashes covered one fifth of the collective surface of our two bodies, though an accurate estimate at that time was thoroughly impossible and is now even more so. Only the upper lip, lip wound, and lip ring area of our bodies did we maintain in a st
ate of scrupulous cleanliness. Our interest in corporal maintenance of any kind dropped off sharply beyond the immediate lip area. In fact, for reasons we did not have the mental coherency to question, our bodies had become to us, at best, life-support systems for our upper lips.

  Stephen Samuels, my former friend and math tutor and maid, arrived wearing a comically exaggerated scowl meant to show his attitude toward our lifestyle. Stephen was trim and well-rested and wore a navy four-button worsted wool suit, the jacket of which he held prissily folded over his left forearm while he sat down on a rolled sleeping bag. The complexion of his face was clear and smooth. His posture and movements seemed designed to say, “I find everything in my immediate vicinity distasteful, but for the sake of my dear, dear friends I am willing to endure my own discomfort, though God knows you in particular, Mary, have been nothing if not disloyal to me on a Mata Harian scale.”

  Mittler and I sat up and faced him, insofar as it was possible to face anyone but each other.

  “How come you look so good?” I asked him.

  “Oh, I have my own small upstart company now, thank you.”

  “What’s your company?”

  “It’s a little thing I like to call Mountebank, Incorporated.”

  Mittler said, “What product or service do you offer?”

  “Marketing consultation.”

  “What do you market?”

  “I market ideas about marketing.”

  “What do the people you market your ideas to market?”

  “Packages.”

  “What’s in the packages?”

  “Things and ideas of things.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Oh, sweetheart, that is so unimportant. I train my clients to train their market how to feel toward the packages my clients’ ideas come in, but this is really quite a bore to discuss with you two as I see that you have no idea what I’m talking about, and are your pupils crazy dilated or did someone replace your eyeballs with black marbles?”

  “Marbles,” we said.

  “Oh, the little Pushmi-Pullyu is tripping its brains out. Isn’t that just darling.”

  I said, “How did you know we were here?”

  “I ran into those two friends of yours, the forlorn hipsters, those children who, between the two of them, form the number ten.”

  “Dierdre and Harry?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Dierdre got raped.”

  “No wonder she looked so hideous.”

  “Stephen, you are cold.”

  “With my fragile emotional makeup I cannot afford to be hot,” he said. “I have alerted my quondam father of your whereabouts. He may come for a visit. He may also inform Ms. September Hartman so her head doesn’t get worried.”

  “I don’t care about her head. She kicked me out!” I said.

  “On Christmas Eve!” Mittler said.

  “Yes, well, being what I am, I find the situations you get yourself into quite amusing, Mary. You allowed yourself to be sold by one Caucasian to another Caucasian, and now you have more or less shackled yourself intentionally to this boy. These are types of situations that I as a twentieth-century Negro feel disinclined to get myself involved in.”

  “We resent what you’re saying,” we said.

  “Yes, of course you do,” Stephen said. “This is such a hetero thing you’re doing here. You would never catch a couple of homos doing this. You would never catch a man doing this without a woman. It’s very vagina-y in here. You’ve even got an herbal-vaginal tea brewing on the stove.”

  Stephen Samuels looked at his watch, said that he had a meeting with some people about a canine mint breath-freshener concept, and excused himself.

  Nietzschean fashion model Ruella Forecourt arrived not long after with her husband, Joe Samuels. Joe, usually chatty, seemed cowed that afternoon. Ruella spoke a great deal, the heaviness of her Swiss-German accent advancing and retreating with the passion of her feelings on a given subject. She told us the story about the day Friedrich Nietzsche saw a man whipping his little dray horse too often and too hard on a street outside his apartment in Turin. Nietzsche ran out into the street and embraced the forlorn, bleeding horse about the neck, and the horse began speaking to Nietzsche in fluent German. At this point, Nietzsche crossed the invisible border between philosophy and madness, without a return ticket, as Ruella put it. On the afternoon when Ruella visited us, I felt that she existed to embody the topic of conversation between Nietzsche and the horse.

  “Oh, darlings,” she said, “the light in here is perfectly lurid.”

  “Lurid,” Joe agreed, nodding vigorously.

  “I would love to shoot stills of you in situ. The little Siamese twins. Of course you would have to be naked, and my dear boy you would have to grab her here like so.”

  “I don’t grab her there,” Mittler said.

  “We don’t ever get naked,” I said.

  “Why my dears, could you possibly mean that you two do not enjoy sexual congress?”

  “Congress, the executive and judicial branches,” I said.

  “But you must let me shoot nudes of you.”

  “No nudes,” we said.

  “I have of course told you about my pornography project?” she said. “I intend to assemble a complete visual typology of dominant and submissive sexual positions for women. Of those positions I will then create a sign language on the model of the American Sign Language for the deaf. Either a given position will be assigned an arbitrary letter value—for example, woman sits backward on supine man’s penis will be the letter a—or a position will function as an ideogram—for example, woman reclining alone, legs casually spread, bracing herself on her elbows, gently touching the sides of her own hips would represent water or peace. Once I have created my Alphabet of Female Sexual Positions, I will then write feminist treatises using this alphabet, and I hope others will do so as well. And that is my project and you are lovely children that I would like to include in your peculiar tent.”

  “Nope,” we said.

  “I’m financing the project,” Joe said proudly. That was Joe’s first feckless chink in Ruella’s wall of speech.

  I said, “No hard documentation, please.”

  “Or soft,” Mittler said. “How much does the project cost?” he asked Joe.

  “Much more than you’d think,” Joe said, “and she’s reaping all the profit.”

  “How come?”

  “Because I love her.”

  “Also because Joseph and I agree that I must not be subjugated by him. Yes, because you see the white man may subjugate the African-American man and the white man may subjugate the indigenous American man and the white man may subjugate the South American man and the white man may subjugate the Caribbean man and the white man may subjugate the Chinese man and the white man may subjugate the European man but—oh, darling, who is that thin boy I am thinking of?”

  Joe said, “How the hell should I know, dear?”

  “Dear, you mustn’t say ‘hell’ to me. The thin lovely martyr boy, the one who said the beautiful thing I want to tell the children.”

  “John Lennon,” Joe said.

  “Yes, children, the white man may subjugate all the other men and even himself but you see the little fellow John Lennon who died so dreadfully also said to us that the woman is the nigger of the world,” a phrase which in Ruella’s mouth sounded like Deh voomon eess deh neegah uff de veldt. “One must at all costs avoid to be subjugated,” she said.

  Mittler said, “But you’re subjugating Joe.”

  “No, darling, I am using Joe.”

  “That’s worse.”

  “Oh, no, darling, it is better. It is good to use, and even more so, it is good to be used. I myself wake up in the morning and I cannot wait for the first person to use me today. Oh, it is beautiful to be used and it is fun to be used. In the woman’s life it is the supreme achievement to be used and the man must learn to honor the woman by using her properly. The man also must le
arn to be used by the woman and to enjoy it because it is lovely. For me personally I am sometimes so impatient for someone to use me that I give up waiting and use myself.”

  Mildred, the girlfriend of Chetty, who when her feathers were not too ruffled behaved like a mother hen, had been hen enough one day to shoplift a pair of flexible narrow-necked toothbrushes and bring them back to us at the roost. That night, Mittler and I carried the new toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste into a small room where a smooth white porcelain bowl of water rested on the floor. Above the porcelain bowl, Mittler and I stood side by side, as much as that was possible. First I and then Mittler squeezed the tube and laid the bright green toothpaste down along the tops of the bristles of our toothbrushes. We angled our heads away from each other as far as we could without hurting ourselves, and opened our mouths wide. Our two mouths, connected and opened as they were, resembled a symbol for infinity in which the two adjacent loops were filled in with black ink. We brushed. While brushing, Mittler brought up the topic of, “Is this working out for you?”

  “Is what working out?”

  “Our arrangement.”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Think about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, I mean right now.”

  “I just did.”

  “And?”

  “I’m saying, it’s okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Well, it’s nice. It’s fun. I mean I think sometime I’ll want to, you know, go outside again, go for a run, ride a bus. I’ve been thinking of getting a dog,” I said, shoving the bristles back and forth along the tops of my lower right molars.

  “I don’t want you to buy a dog. People with dogs are liars. Like the person will trip on the sidewalk and blame it on the dog.”

  “How about ride a bus?”

  “What about how nicely we’re attached to each other?”

  “I just said, it’s fun.”

  “But I want to always be this way with you.”

  “Literally?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Do you?”

  We rinsed and spat.