[This story appeared in QZ Volume 1, an art & lit mag created during the pandemic. Shameless plug to check it out here]
The two of them shared the bathtub. Two grown men facing each other. Four grown-men legs, fully extended, each man’s feet gently hooked around the hips of the other.
You comfy?
Strange thing to ask a man in his own bathtub, Milos thought. But he just nodded and said, Plenty comfy, thanks.
The Mayor arched an eyebrow and also his mustache. The two appeared to arch not just at the same time but with the exact same degree of curvature. Milos found the trick eerie and also satisfying. The Mayor laced his fingers over his belly and took a breath that inflated his torso to a seemingly impossible size. You look like the type for whom it might be time for a drink, he said.
Milos declined. The Mayor insisted. The Mayor said his Old Fashioned recipe could turn Billy Sunday himself into a full-on pissed-jeans loady overnight. After yet more prodding Milos said okay. Last thing he wanted to do was play the man’s game, but a drink did sound good right about now. The Mayor dipped a hand below the water’s surface and brought up a highball finished with cherry and an orange twist instead of a slice and no bathwater in the glass.
It was the best Milos had ever had. Before he could say so, the Mayor grew suddenly serious. We don’t have so much in the way of time, he said.
Milos took a long drink and a deep breath. Your note said I was gonna be …
Yes.
Milos sank into the water. Just yesterday morning he’d gotten the Mayor’s message and then spent his potentially last day pacing the apartment and wondering what to do and coming up empty for hours and now here they were. He felt numb. Nothing upstairs. Something like despair floating around up there but more muted, gauzy. The feeling of a silent scream that’s also underwater just for good measure. The feeling of the kind of cloudy day where the gray stretches from one horizon to the next with no beginning or end.
The Mayor reached into the water and produced a pen and pad which he held in the manner of an old-timey beat reporter.
We don’t gotta be so formal, Milos said.
The Mayor looked him in the eye. Things can’t go on the way they been, I’m afraid.
Is that you saying that?
On behalf of everyone.
I’d like to talk to everyone.
They’re around.
The Mayor appeared to nod at the bathroom door but Milos understood him to be nodding at what lay beyond it. From the other side of the door came the sound of many voices whispering. Particularly dry, the whispers, like a hundred winds moving through a single patch of scrub.
They’re in a lather, Milos said. They ain’t gonna listen to me like this.
The Mayor was busy jotting a note. He paused briefly to indicate the towel hook that held his clothes, where his pearl-white oxford shirt hung with the word MAYOR scrawled across it in black marker. I’m an elected official, he said. And so are you, when you boil it down. And that’s a majority. He swung his eyes from the shirt to the door.
Milos cleared his throat. What’s gonna happen to me?
The Mayor sat thinking, tapping his lip with the pen. You’ll be joining the ranks. Mas o menos. That’s the billboard version at least.
You gotta talk to em for me.
The whisper flared up from beyond the door. Milos gripped the edge of the tub. They were close. He pictured them scrambling over each other like ants.
It’s been reckoned by the group that you are the wrong personality for this operation. You have been deemed insufficiently proactive to meet the needs of yourself.
And what’s the highly scientific measuring stick there?
The Mayor returned his notes. No tail, he quoted. You have brought in zero tail in over a year. They demand sexy action. The Mayor turned a page. Plus you’re too passive in work meetings.
Milos sputtered. He couldn’t find the words. All of a sudden breathing had become something he had to think about.
The Mayor put the notebook back into the water. My condolences. The vote’s final.
There was a thump against the door. The whispering was nonstop now. The word din came to mind. See? Milos was smart. Literary, even. They had no idea how much they were gonna miss that. Remove his brain and replace it with a second dick?
Fuck it. He stood up. At some point the Mayor had handed him a second cocktail. He felt godlike: naked, drunk, towering. Cascades of bathwater thundered down his chest and arms to rejoin the water below with a din of their own. He stepped out of the tub and stood dripping on the bathmat. The Mayor called his name softly.
It was chilly outside the tub. He imagined his manhood somewhat reduced but didn’t look down. The bathroom was small. The apartment was shit. It only took two steps to get to the window. He took no pride in his living space. That was maybe a problem. And yet not. If anything, it was a they problem.
He sized up the window. He reared back and punched with all the force he could muster.
Except he didn’t. He’d hesitated at the last second, he realized, and now came the pain. He pulled his hand in and tucked it against his chest as the brokenness set in and he tried not to wail. Then he wailed and fell against the wall.
Have some dignity, for chrissakes, the Mayor said.
The brightness in the window suggested sun outside. It was the kind of cheap textured window that made everything blurry. It was an early spring day out there with the world just starting to turn. And here he was, trapped, shitty old apartment, the window didn’t open, trapped, useless window on the one side, hungry castoff savages on the other. He turned and looked around the room. He spotted Mayor’s shirt. He grabbed the shirt off the hook and wrapped his good hand up in it.
The thumps against the door were getting louder and more frequent and the Mayor was having to shout. A feast for our boy on this his last evening.
Soon came the smell of food. Milos turned briefly and saw the Mayor holding a thick oak slab full of meats and cheeses and pastries and more. Milos turned back to the window and fired another punch. This one he meant, and it connected. Didn’t go through. Incredible pain. But the window cracked. He leaned back, punched again. Punched again. Already there were hints of blood speckling the oxford. He punched over and over. The crack became a small hole in the glass and Milos, propelled by a variant of joy he’d never known — he was hot and giddy and everything in the room looked like it wanted to be smashed and torn apart and it was all for him — Milos formed a hook with two shirt-covered fingers and began to pry bits of glass away from the central hole. Before long he had a hole the size roughly of him.
Barbarians at the shitter’s gates, the Mayor said from the tub. I’ve got a mind to let em loose.
Milos scrambled up onto the sink. The Mayor’s voice was noise. Milos got his arms through the hole and was now sliding along the sill and making steady if agonizing progress. His head came out. There was grass below. Soft green grass for him to drop onto and run off like some mythical creature. With each scoot along the sill came blinding pain in his stomach and chest but his lungs were moving something more powerful than air, he was pumped full of atomized rocket fuel and was about to —
Milos was in the tub. He looked down. He felt outside himself. He looked up at the Mayor. An equator ran across the Mayor’s chest. The hairs below it were dark and matted while above they were tufty and gray and feathery. The thumping against the door had only grown more forceful but Milos was in a bubble of quiet. He looked down and watched the red trails whisper out of his belly and into the water and then fan out and turn orange and disperse into nothing. The door exploded off its hinges. Finally. Behind him. He tried to turn but found he lacked the energy and all he could say was
Damn.
Floating slowly over, feet grazing the mists like crane’s wings across a still lake, Steve Jobs points at the table and says, "Put your hand right there, please."
Most can’t conceive of a heaven that includes pain. Which isn’t totally off the mark. Any sensation, pain included, requires a particular change in a particular stimulus. A nerve state must go from 0 to 1. God didn’t set it up like that. But since even The Kingdom is still technically part of reality, you might say in this case that baby has indeed followed bathwater, in that we don’t experience what the still-living consider pleasure. Here, you have to get creative with your jollies.
"Now Steve —” I says.
Steve cuts me off wordlessly, using this telepathy-type trick he invented a while back. From what little I understand about its inner workings, Steve’s telepathy hack is cleverer than anything in human history, and not by a little. But he won’t share it with anyone except Prince, Harry Dean Stanton and of course the Almighty.
Steve bounces his eyebrows. I’m testing his patience.
How is this who I’ve become? Never once during my living days did I fall prey to this sort of playground-bully dynamic. But I never let myself near this sort of person, either.
I sigh through my nose and lift my feet. I’m dragassing my way toward the table when things start shaking all around us. Little droplets of vaporous spacetime spume up, a kind of rain in reverse. It happens here. Jobs maintains eye contact; they smile, those Athenian eyes, here, finally, as clear and deep as they were always meant to be. I can’t help but find their twinkle enchanting.
Then He enters from across the … well, spacial stuff is different here. Let’s call it a room. But He comes in looking a bit like everyone I’ve ever seen, standing around twelve feet tall, having cooked up a perfect expression of placid amusement.
"You boys hear? Sendak’s about to hit the trade block." He stops and looks down at Jobs and me. His brow folds handsomely, as if he finds this all very surprising and amusing indeed. Which is impossible when you know all. For the briefest moment, I pity my creator.
"Don’t tell me," Jobs says. “They want ..."
Their eyes brighten. They count together: "One… two… three… Mario Puzo!" and break into mismatched but, I must admit, beautifully compatible laughter, like Jasmine and Aladdin learning to fold their distant registers into star-crossed love. The Big One’s big belly laugh, needless to say, pings sonorously between the many translucent figures tessellating endlessly throughout the void, forming a gleaming cat’s cradle before returning like a boomerang of the purest, most selfless love.
“Damn,” Steve says, craning upward.
“Fuckin’ A,” says the Father of All Creation, admiring his own handiwork.
They’re distracted. Now’s my time. I raise my legs and start gliding gently in reverse. Except I don’t move. My hand is stuck as if by invisible dart to a particular spot on the desk. My spirit sinks. I feel Jobs smile off camera. I look to my Heavenly Father, trying to look as respectable as possible. Like I have some backbone. Like I didn’t just hang my head and let this happen. Which I did.
Why do I want Steve to like me?
God meets my gaze with an expression like Whoa hey have you been here the whole time?
I make one last attempt to pull my hand off the spongy, eleven-dimensional particle board to which it’s pinned. But the sheriff doesn't answer to his constituents in this town, and right now the rule is for me to just sit tight while Jobs drifts back on over — slow, real casual-like, pivoting clockwise as he moves, docking in backside-first. The simmering fart with which he douses my hand escapes with the sound of a dry train whistle.
To recap:
Physical pleasure? No.
Lovers? No.
Unpleasant odors?
Anything is possible through God Almighty.
They laugh. They high-five. I sigh, but the subsequent deep inhale just makes the smell worse.
It was a cold night for early September.
“Try not to go too deep here. You’re sort of rap rap rapping on the basilic vein’s chamber door.”
“Okay, so how do I —”
“So to speak.”
“Are you really going to keep drinking through this?”
“Alright, two things. First off, booze has already put my miracle mitts on the sideline, so … yeah. Rubicon crossed.”
“Which did I mention how nervous this makes me?”
“And two of all, do you have any idea how much this would cost if I were actually on the clock?”
“I’m thirteen.”
“Soooo …”
“So I don’t know how much doctors cost. You doing okay, brother?”
“Unnngggh.”
“Okay but and thirdly, when you interrupt someone’s quiet evening —”
“Don’t listen to him, boys, you didn’t interrupt anything. Honey, I believe your help is needed.”
“Right. Erm … how you doing, Piper? Oh, wait, someone just asked that, right?”
“Dr. Cass, please. What do I do next?”
“He needs to bend his arm a little. To make sure that when he flexes his elbow with the stitches in it doesn’t, like, explode. Not to get all jargony on you.”
“You get that? You’ve got to bend it a little. Can you —”
“Oh and fourth off, I’m not a surgeon. Let’s make that distinction. Surgeons are just hands. Disembodied, glory-seeking little hands. So don’t —”
“UNNNNGGGH.”
“Oh, man, Pipe. Sorry.”
“Hey, who do your parents hang out with, by the way? Like in the neighborhood.”
“What?”
“I just mean why aren’t your parents here?”
“We kinda didn’t tell them about this.”
“Unnnghgggh.”
“Because what, they’d take away your trampoline?”
“I mean, for starters. After that … honestly, I don’t want to think about it.”
“Jesus. Does anybody let their kids just mess up anymore? When I was your age, a life-threatening stitch-up from your brother was price enough.”
“Unnnghgggh.”
“Does Piper really need to be biting down on that?”
He’s your twin. I just assumed he was a pussy, too.”
“Stephen!”
“Sorry, love. Thing is, Evan, I’d prefer the neighbors not hear him screaming. On the other side of the Rubicon is what they call malpractice country.”
“We appreciate you taking the time. And risk.”
“Speaking of neighbors, is that get-together still going on at your place? The folks like to go late night?”
“They usually make us go to bed during those things.”
“I might wander over once we get Junior back in action. You know if the old man likes scotch?”
“You’d have to ask him. But then … I mean ... they’d know we were here.”
“We wouldn’t say anything. It’d just be like, ‘Hey, what’s up guys, heard the music down the street and I’ve got this fucking amazing bottle of scotch, it was a gift from some Johns Hopkins trustees but nobody else around here seems to understand what that signifies, but, uh … how about you?’”
“Huh?”
“Very sweet of you to offer, Evan. But we weren’t invited. We wouldn’t want to make a scene.”
“No, it’s okay, Mrs. Dr. Cass. I mean … you're helping us out big and everything.”
“She’s right. Forget it. And step back, let’s get a look at that wound again. Whoa, shit ...”
“Stephen!”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I mean, you almost fell over just now, and you look kind of … upset?”
“I’m fine. Just, uh … grab those scissors. And tell me what you see. Honestly, everything went a little soft on me ten minutes ago.”
“I think it might actually look ... okay?”
“Let me see … uh, errmm, yeahhhh, pretty good. I mean, I wouldn’t put your inheritance into starting a fashion house or anything, but you can at least say you saved your brother’s arm.”
“Whoa. Cool."
“Just kidding, not really. But you did save your parents some headroom on their deductible. Oh, and you can take the bit off of your brother now, if he promises to keep it down.”
“Nrrmmguh.”
“Last time. Sorry.”
“OWWW. Gosh. That was … the shittiest … thing … ever.”
“‘Shittiest thing ever’? Do you realize how actually shitty that could have gone? Until thirty seconds ago, I was nintety percent sure I was going to jail tonight. Honestly, I still might.”
“Well, Dr. Cass, it’s been …”
“Really something. Hurry back now, you don’t want your parents wondering why their house is suddenly and inexplicably free of the sounds of muffled internet porn coming from behind your bedroom doors. Actually, that might be your alibi.”
“You want to come by, like you said?”
“...”
“I mean, it’s fine if you don’t want to.”
“No, that’s fine. We’ll be fine here. Just do me one favor.”
“Stephen, dear, your dignity is on the line here. Might wanna cut your losses.”
“My parents are dead. So that’s two people off the table. My brother and I don’t speak. That’s four, including his family. And my cousins are not only scattered across every backwater shithole in this country, they don’t have enough combined income to ship themselves down here via priority mail.”
“Stephen.”
“All I’m saying is, consider us for Thanksgiving.”
The wind had picked up. It rushed noisily and scattered several brittle leaves into the foyer as the boys saw themselves out.
No one’s flying the ship at the Mickey Mouse Club, Vanessa Vanveen has lately concluded. She’s got one eye on the darkened production suite, alive with the shadowy ripples of grips performing thankless chores. Out beneath the scorching set lights sits a taut bridge of trapezius muscle linking shoulder to neck on one Leslie Pratt.
Having leapfrogged more than a couple more senior cast members since arriving this season, Leslie’s been getting the all-eyes-on treatment during shoots. Everyone’s asking all the time whether her hair should maybe do x or y while taking extended, theoretically sexless looks up and down the seams tracing her inner thighs. Though actually it’s not the lolita-style objectification that Vanessa finds repugnant.
“Stick with the flats. The little slip-ons,” says Kevin Royce, emerging from the shadows and shouldering past everyone with a cat carrier full of shoes for Leslie to try on. Leslie’s posture stiffens even more around him, Vanessa’s pretty sure she’s noticed. Kevin, for his part, takes care to be noticeably not-handsy. Whether it’s actually suspicious, Vanessa can’t tell.
A great morass of opinion has formed around Leslie. Set and costume designers, wardrobe all orbit her as adjustment-based worlds, making of Leslie a kind of communal art installation.
Vanessa steps out of position and moves reluctantly to join. “Kevin.”
“Yaap.” Kevin’s down on one knee, intently eyeing Leslie’s feet.
“Maybe Leslie has her own thoughts? I remember her saying she likes heels.”
Kevin stands. His broad red needle of hair swings to point right at her. He’s got a tall head, like home plate squeezed thin. “What are you … What?”
“She’s not… Let’s let her make some decisions of her own. Be an adult.”
Several crew members turn to ponytailed, turtlenecked Ellen The Director. She stands tapping her lip, eyes intently blank, looking through her scene into something more pure and timeless.
“Ellen.” Kevin starts toward production but halts after one step. Ellen doesn’t notice. Her non-response seems to have frozen the nineteen year-old former Mousketeer.
“Don’t you think,” Vanessa says slowly, “maybe people see past the ingenue schtick by now?”
Kevin’s mouth hangs open when he thinks. “Actors play younger,” he says. “They play young, period. That’s how they avoid getting old. Timberlake. Gosling. Spears.”
Vanessa can’t help getting scoffy. “Britney Spears pulled it off twenty years ago. Then the internet happened, and we all saw her vagina, then watched her lose her goddamn mind trying to hit every demo with this Peter-Pan-Honey-Boo-Boo-Nancy-Sinatra shit.”
“So we should what.” Kevin locks in now with Vanessa as if it’s just them in the room. “Paint up Leslie like a cabaret sliz and have her just shake that ass?”
“No, obvious — “
“On the FUCKING MICKEY MOUSE CLUB?”
Any scene-related topicality having clearly evacuated the room, Vanessa lets her face flush. “Let’s talk about that, Kevin. About how you — as the latest in a long line of people going from cast member to production track —”
“That’s got nothing to do —”
“As someone whose future depends on keeping people down and underpaid and feeling like they’re worth far less than they are — let’s talk about how you, as the charmingly overweight, superlatively white face of the Club’s darkest parts, have more than a couple incentives to keep Leslie under thumb. Or am I missing something?”
“Or,” Kevin lurching toward her now, finger raised. “OR is it possible that you, as the sad-sack, thick-in-the-hips poster child for coulda-been child stars everywhere — is it possible you can’t get over your failed career and are trying on vicarious living for size? Is that maybe kinda possible?”
“I’m trying to keep a young star from making the kind of decisions that held me back.”
“It wasn’t about decisions. You just aren’t good.” That finger is now within a foot of Vanessa’s face. “Your rhythm is off. You’ve got no face. Your time here will be nothing more than a story your grandkids get sick of before they’re old enough to tell you to stop your yapping.”
There’s movement near the line separating scene from darkened production area. “Okay,” Ellen calls. “Forget the shoes, actually. It’s going to be a waist-up.”
Leslie relaxes a little, it seems to Vanessa. “So should I stick to my mark?”
“Yeah,” Ellen adjusting her lens. “Just stand there and say the line. I’m gonna try something.”
Vanessa settles in beside the others in the cast tent. Leslie’s devastatingly neutral features bore into her from the set. Makeup crew backs away. Leslie breathes deep, shakes her tiny self loose. To her left Vanessa hears Kevin cough and mutter instructions to a grip.
Buster stood atop table six in a drop stance, the Glock cocked and wavering in his hand. Late summer dusk had finally settled in outside: a perfect night for sticking around, taking a moment to savor being alive. A tremor of warm air warbled up and over his pate. He was sure it was growing more exposed each day; this whorl he’d never tried to look at was now forfeiting its perfect form forever.
In the leftmost corner of his periphery Buster saw a single exception to the looks of horror fixed on him throughout the room. It was contempt, this Other Thing. Inaction as family-man courtesy rather than expression of fear. Buster couldn’t turn away completely from this strange patron, this cowboy brewing treason out of sight. He recalled the face, anyhow, recalled how the man had ordered the check without a second thought. Even then, the disdain was clear. So, no: There in that corner spot he’d stay, just visible enough to know Buster had him in check.
At no point had Buster commanded the low-lit diners to stay still. But thousands of collective years of movie watching had trained them. It seemed possible the itchy heart in the corner had grazed a different Friday-night buffet growing up, had absorbed some real tart ideas on how to act in the face of doom. But who knew. Buster felt the man breathe.
Throughout these long minutes he’d found it easiest to let his gaze rest on a pair of young children. One male, one female. Both wearing horizontal red-and-white stripes, both somewhere between five and ten. Buster could never tell anymore.
He’d learned lately to start targeting the little ones straightaway. Bearing the burden of parents’ hopes, they had a hand on the purse strings no charm could hope to match. Kids had never liked Buster, though, for some reason. He tried with them. Maybe too hard. These particular ones had feathery blonde hair and dark, dark eyes disinclined to focus.
“Cumawn, feel the noise,” came the exhortation, quieter now at Buster’s request, from the speakers in the ceiling. Nicole, working a solo Wednesday shift behind the bar, had been invited to keep her hands glued to the house music controls.
The little boy happened then to emerge from his rote, wide-eyed state and come, for once, to stare at Buster rather than through him. Inside, two gears met and clicked. Instantly Buster was transported back to that morning’s staff meeting, right here in the high-ceilinged dining room, morning light easing in from the now-regrettably large front window. The sole entrance and exit was to stay locked for an hour to come.
Mo, the long-tenured floor manager, a short guy with the darkest little pebbly peepers of his own, had gathered waitstaff, kitchen and bar to address some concern he wouldn’t specify in the email.
“Guys,” Mo’d said between loud slurps of coffee, “We’ve got to start selling more desserts.”