|
|
|
||||
|
Make a Gift to the Arts & Letters
Endowment Arts & Letters Editorial Staff Learn about the MFA Program
at GCSU |
|
Faults
By: Viet Dinh |
|
Three of I-980’s overpasses collapsed into
concrete and meat sandwiches. Entire
streets have been blocked with rubble; others have cracks wide enough to
swallow whole tires. With the
thousands of people trying to escape, the traffic along the main roads is
thicker than congealed blood. So
there’s something beautiful about the way that Jack drives. The van moves like an extension of himself,
the way he weaves, swerves, lurches forward and turns. He cuts corners without a bump. If we’re stuck, he peals down alleys lined
with black puddles and an overpowering piss smell. He attributes it to his upbringing. “Getting away,” he says, “is the first
thing you learn.” Jack is short for Joaquim, which he got from his Puerto Rican father, along
with the dark complexion, the brown hair that looks black when wet. “My mother,” he says, “didn’t like it too
much when he skipped out on her, so she’s called me Jack since I was
two.” The
regular rules (red means stop, green means go) have no bearing. In their panic, stoplights blink
emergency. Many lie dashed in the
street, glass eyes shattered, still hardwired for order. In the back of the van, we’ve recovered: six TVs, ranging from 13” to 24”; three
sets of speakers and an odd one for which we couldn’t find a partner; two
full stereo consoles; several multi-disc CD players. The eight boomboxes,
I fight with him to keep. “Those
things don’t bring in shit,” he says.
“You get at most twenty, twenty-five dollars.” “That’s
twenty-five more than you would have had.” “Fuck,
man.” He spits out a brown bullet of
used-up tobacco. “That’s your
problem. You think too small.” I convince
him that the boomboxes are like bubblewrap,
buffers to keep the bigger and more expensive stuff from getting
damaged. He says, “You still don’t get
it, do you?” * * * The first
thing I ever stole was a heart. I was
in the second grade, and we had been making Valentine mailboxes. We cut them out of construction paper, soft
and fuzzy as felt, using the rounded scissors with rubber handles. But my hand got tired from cutting; after
ten minutes, all I had was a collection of shaky red ghosts. So while everyone else pasted their
hearts—long and skinny, thick, squat, fat—onto their bags, I collected
scraps, the negative heart-space others swept into the trash. But those
weren’t the hearts I stole. One girl,
instead of those antacid chalk conversation hearts, had foil-wrapped
chocolate hearts. I saw her tucking
them in her Valentines, the seal on the envelopes refusing to stick closed. It was the
only time I volunteered to wipe the chalkboard after school. While the teacher went to the restroom, I
took out hearts like Jack the Ripper, dropping them in my pocket. It made me breathless, all that running
around, all the chocolate, all for me.
The stealing got worse from there. * * * We had
been sitting in the apartment, smoking cigarettes and watching Tuesday
morning cartoons when the quake hit.
First the sound: I thought it
was gunshots, three of them, and went to the window to see what was going
down. It’s a bad habit, like watching
talk shows where everyone busts out with fists, but better: it’s real. But those
gunshots were awfully loud, like God’s Camaro
backfiring. Next thing I know, the
sound’s a jet plane flying overhead, and I’m jumping without using my
legs. The floor fell out from under
me. When I met back up with it, we
weren’t on good terms. I slammed down,
catching my inner lip between my teeth, biting straight through. “Holy—”
said Jack, but he didn’t finish, because he got thrown too. I slid on
the floor. Jack made it to the TV and
held onto it as if he loved it more than anything else in the world. In the kitchen, plastic dishes clattered to
the floor. The refrigerator threw up
leftover Chinese food. The ceiling
rolled above my head for a while until my face met a table leg. Jack crouched low, keeping his balance the
way he does when the subway pulls into the station and he’s not holding on to
anything. It was
over like that too, all of a sudden. “What the
fuck?” Jack said. Blood in
my mouth. I tried to remember what my
seventh-grade earth science teacher said about earthquakes, about plates and
faults, but all I remembered was his demonstration: a lump of brown sugar on a baking
tray. He shook the tray, and the sugar
disintegrated into chunks, into granules.
I watched the sugar chunks running away, off the edge of the tray. Jack set
the TV on the floor. The world caught
its breath. Up and down the block, car
alarms wailed. “Was that
it?” he asked, breathless. I couldn’t
stop salivating. My head felt
scrambled. “Man,”
Jack said, rushing to the window, “that was fucking awesome!” I stumbled towards the couch. The cushions had been pushed forward, as if
someone was looking for spare change.
They were still warm from Jack’s ass. His dropped cigarette had burned a new hole
into the upholstery, crisp around the edges, black as the mole on his
back. The voices
started then. The crying and the
screaming and the wonderment, the prayers and the moans, in a thousand
languages, from next door, from above, from the street,
incomprehensible. Jack
flicked his head from side to side.
“Come see this,” he said.
“In-fucking-credible.” I rubbed
the spot where I hit my head. “People
are crawling out like roaches,” he said.
“Damn, that house tipped over.
It’s crazy!” He nudged me. “Come on, man,” he said. “Get dressed.” * * * Disasters
and war—that’s all old people talk about.
No matter what they’ve lived through or everything they’ve done, when
they get together, they talk about disasters and war. Maybe those experiences are the most
memorable. Or maybe, when we get old
and senile, only the things that have shocked us, made us pray to God—maybe
only those get through our thick, swampy brains. It’s not the name of the first girl you
ever kissed or the tune playing when you first got laid or the smell of a
neck right after you’ve licked it—it’s death and destruction: the more, the better. Jack,
already twenty-six when I met him, warned me about this. We worked as orderlies in Hampstead Home,
the largest dementia-specialist assisted-living complex in “The worst ones,” said Jack, “are the war
vets. Man, they just go on and
on.” We both wore loose green
scrubs. The Hampstead House logo was
stitched in red thread above my left nipple.
The stitching made the logo hard to the touch, like a scab. Jack was clean-shaven then. The night before, I had taken my first
shower in two weeks. Jack had
worked there eight months and made Employee-of-the-Month, his name engraved
on a cracker-sized brass plate. He
explained the code so that I wouldn’t have to read the binder in its
entirety. He demonstrated quick ways
to clean up both wet and dry accidents.
The supply closets, doors painted so that they were indistinguishable
from the wall, were visible to him alone.
Inside: brooms, mops, buckets,
and the powder used to solidify wet accidents. He also
gave me patient pointers. Walking them
down the hall was an art. You have to
take a normal-sized step and twist your body to urge your patient
forward. Otherwise, they don’t feel
inclined to hurry, and they shuffle along at their own, frustrating
pace. Losing your temper three times,
he said, is grounds for dismissal. His method
wasn’t easy. The women always wanted
to hold my hand, even the fully-mobile ones.
Jack didn’t let anyone hold his hand.
Instead, he put his arm around the women’s shoulders like a Lothario
and seduced them forward, a complex tango of crutch, wheelchair, or
soft-handled walker. He was
slick. He winked at me, as if
acknowledging a private joke. When he
got around to asking where I lived, he said, “Hey, I could use a
roommate.” I replied,
“Well, I could use a place to live.” * * * Dust hangs
in the air like mid-day fog, like we’ve been driving down dirt roads for the
last half-hour. But this is “What,”
says Jack, “have we here?” A long
stretch of shops and bodegas, front windows cracked clean through. The paper signs taped to the inside of the
windows have fallen. Fruit, once
stacked in Mayan pyramids, now lie bruised on the floor. People run down the street with shopping
carts stuffed full, and others rush in.
Between two storefronts is a small electronics repair shop. “Hurry,”
he says. He parks the van so that its
bulk blocks the view of what we’re doing. The grate
that rolls over the window has been wrenched free of its securing
padlocks. The bars in front of the
door are intact, but it doesn’t matter.
In the front window are VCRs and CD players, easily turned sideways
and slipped through the bars. In the
back, pinned to the wall, is a flag the size of a diploma, some South
American country: it’s got red and
green and banana trees and camouflaged guerilla soldiers, passing kilos of
coke between them. “Jack,” I
ask, “which flag is that?” He’s irritated.
“Fuck if I know.” His anger is
a string of firecrackers: lots of
noise, then quickly forgotten. “Don’t you recognize it?” I taunt him now because he’s got his arms
full so that he can’t slug me. By the
time his hands are empty, he’ll forget to hit me. “You know
I don’t speak a word of Spanish, so shut up, pendejo. Here.”
He shoves a VCR, wires and cables dangling from it, into my arms. The back of the van is humid; it’s like I’m
plunging my arms into someone’s body. Then: the first aftershock. I finish tucking away the VCR when the
swaying starts. A woman, baseball cap
low on her forehead, cries out as her cart tips over. Down to the pavement she goes. Her cap flies off and her curly hair fans
onto the street. I grab the van doors,
but they swing, and I realize: at any
moment, the several hundred pounds of electronics could come
tumbling down. I don’t get out of the
way; I think I can hold everything in.
We’ve worked hard for this stuff.
The
shockwaves are brief. Jack yells,
“That’s it.” I straighten out,
dizzy. People mill around, recovering. “Cool
ride, huh?” Jack says, grinning. All
that time, he was holding a stereo amplifier.
He passes it to me. “Anything
broken?” “I’m
fine.” “No,
stupid. Anything in the van
broken?” Everything’s
shifted. My careful stacking paid
off. “Let’s
jet,” he says. The woman
has righted her cart and replaces what had fallen out with one hand. Her other hand hangs limp at the
wrist. More people have come out; they
stare. They don’t accuse or
threaten—they’re waiting for their turn.
By the end of the day, all these stores will be smashed,
pillaged. Earlier, we passed blocks
that had already been raided:
trashcans thrown through windows, mailboxes busted open, doors
violated with crowbars. Two looters
were bellowing and shooting guns in the air.
They wore black ski masks. One
had a red child’s wagon filled with groceries and a microwave oven. They laughed. In the
van, the radio comes in staticky, because the
antenna has snapped clean off, leaving an aluminum nub. I tune to the news. Already, the deejays tell people to leave
their buildings, because aftershocks could come at any time. If you are injured, seek help
immediately. If you have a vehicle,
please help drive the injured to nearby hospitals, because rescue workers are
overloaded. Additional units are
coming from surrounding towns. Donate
blood. Stay out of the way. “Turn that
shit off,” says Jack. “It’s
depressing.” We both
watch for any place that hasn’t been touched.
That’s the thing: you have to
be first. At 10 in the morning, we
were already behind. Marauders move
quickly. The police, stretched thin,
have flocked in front of the more prosperous strip malls, lights twirling red
and blue. But with few more choice
items, we could bring in a month or two of easy living, of real food, of
nights not spent with the TV. “I bet
Emeryville is still clean,” Jack says.
Emeryville is a scale on * * * I
preferred watching TV to talking with Jack.
After moving to I could
have been worse. Two friends of mine
drank themselves head-on into telephone poles. I had just squeaked through Lakewood High,
and my parents were plying me with technical college. In the meantime, I discovered the sleepytime magic of codeine and Coca-Cola. Jack found
this funny: “You were hooked on lean?”
he said. “Man, that’s so white of you.” He had his pot friends to hang with. I didn’t socialize with anyone at work, and
people from the shelter were heroin magnets.
His couch
had been my bed for a year and a half, the cushions molded to my
contours. On the nights that Jack went
out, I lay quietly. I concentrated on
the street noises: cars pulling up and
peeling away; shouts, hollers, and most often, loud talking; baby cries; the
occasional but jarring gunshot; laughter that sprinkled down like drizzle;
shopping carts rattling and squealing, separated from the supermarket parking
lot. I felt movement, both inside and
outside. Quick thrusts of blood
through my body. I imagined myself as
the earth. It was no longer blood
pumping, but rock, searing squirts of it.
When Jack
brought home girls, I was still as cement, despite the locks rattling loudly,
the poorly suppressed giggles as Jack hustled the girl into his room. Rarely would the girl be around in the
morning. Once, after such a night,
Jack—eyes red and bleary—sat at the table, smoking a cigarette,
shirtless. He had a tattoo of a
burning heart between his nipples.
Hair grew out of the heart. “Deanna
was fucking fantastic,” he announced.
“You should try her.” “There’s
barely enough room on that couch for me.”
“Lame excuse.” “Let me
have your room,” I said, “and I’ll bring home all the girls I want.” “You know
what I like about you?” Jack asked.
“You’re fucking crazy.” When I
turned twenty-one, Jack took me on a binge tour—seven bars, three hours,
three cities. We started in San Fran,
in the bars that served free beer to birthday boys, and gradually moved
closer to “This is
my best fucking friend in the world,” he said, loudly. And I wasn’t ashamed. He clung to my shoulder and we hobbled like
two old men supporting each other.
“I’m going to make sure he has the best birthday.” I was
amazed how quickly he charmed women.
In the space of a bathroom break, he had relocated into a booth with a
girl wearing a lime-green halter top.
She had cheeks like a hamster. “Carla,”
he slurred, “this is my best fucking friend.” She barely
acknowledged me. “Best
fucking friend, this is Carla.” “Come on,
Jack. Time to go.” My head hurt. His fingers slid over Carla’s pants. “No,” he
said. “Carla wants to come with.” I drove
while they made out in the passenger’s seat, sloppily, noisily. When we arrived home, they had moved to the
back. Carla was spread-eagled on the
metal floor, her top pushed up, the bottoms of her
breasts peeking out. Jack had his belt
and zipper undone, shirt untucked. “Hey,” Jack said, “why don’t you join us?” Jack put his arm around my waist, his fingers
curling around my hipbone, and leaned in close to my face; his breath was 160
proof, hot. “Happy
birthday, man,” he whispered. He
wasn’t conspiratorial or conniving; Carla heard every word. She didn’t care. But this was beyond the limits of our
friendship. Even drunk, I wanted his
chin on my shoulder. His bobbing and
weaving. The way he drew closer until
his nose brushed my cheek. But I not
like this. My hand found his, and I
pried his hand off my hip. “No,
thanks,” I said. “She’s all
yours.” I stepped over her as if she
were a rolled-up rug. She was gone by
morning. * * * In
Emeryville, we pass a woman in gray sweats, sunglasses, screaming, “Oh my
God!”—hands against her head. She must
have been on her morning run. Her lawn
is crumpled like a green blanket kicked off in a fit of passion. Sand and mud bubble from the exposed
ground. Her house has imploded. Further
down, Jack backs into the driveway of a house with a fallen-in roof. The sliding back patio door lies in jagged,
irregular shards. The collapsed roof
creates a narrow, triangular hallway of long splinters and exposed
nails. Jack walks sideways down
it. I smell gas. I call out, “Hello?” Maybe someone is hurt inside, and if the
police come, we can say we were looking for victims, we were trying to help. Bedrooms
are to the right. Paint has flaked off
the walls, revealing different colors beneath: sky blue, autumn yellow. Sheet rock, drywall—it’s like a cut-away
model of a house. Here we have a
support column, snapped like a dry chicken bone. Here we have exposed plumbing, burbling out
water. Here the walls bleed fluffy
pink insulation. I look for live
wires. Maybe the electric company shut
off the juice. Maybe the power lines
have timbered, spines broken at the base. I’m now
sure that it’s gas that I smell, maybe from a dislodged oven? Water heater? I feel light-headed. “Look what
I found,” says Jack, off somewhere.
The odd corners blunt his voice.
“Jack,” I
say, “let’s get out of here.” “Come take
a look. It’s the motherlode.” I’m
getting tired of saving him. “We need
to go now.” I pick my way towards him,
shuffling along the thick-piled carpet.
He stands
in front of a stereo console that has been spared. The stereo cabinet’s glass front is opaque
with drywall dust. “Top of the line,” he says. A dark V of moisture stains the back of his
t-shirt. “Help me unplug all
this.” The back of the console is a
tangle of wires, like the tails in a rat king. My seventh-grade teacher once showed us an
x-ray of one: the rats incapable of
freeing themselves from one another.
The other rats, he said, will feed on the ones unable to move. An outlet
octopus holds the power cords in place, and it’s been browned. Cords snake to the backs of other
components. “Where do all these lines
go?” he says. The clump of plugs
wobbles, like it’s ready to explode. “Jack,” I
say, touching him on the shoulder. He
jumps up and I jump back from the electric crackle. “Jesus
Christ!” he says, “are you trying to kill us? One spark and we’re both fried.” “Sorry.” “Damn
straight you’re sorry. Hold out your
arms.” I know
this drill. He yanks the octopus free
and disconnects everything, unscrewing, prying. The hardware is important. The cables are not. He deposits a 50-carousel CD changer into
my arms, followed by a dual tape player and a receiver. It is top quality. Outside, as I’m putting everything in the
van, a thrumming in my ear makes me look up.
A helicopter. The glare from
the sun is too bright; I can’t make out the insignia on the side. Police surveillance? Chopper 6 traffic? Maybe they’re taking an overview of the
situation. I tip my chin low so it’ll
be harder to identify me. Jack comes out with a DVD player and an
amplifier. “Almost done,” he
says. He notices the chopper too and
ducks back inside. There’s barely any
room left—I shove the DVD player under my seat and the amplifier under
his. The van rides low on the back
tires; that’s how much cargo we have. From
inside, Jack calls, “Can I get some motherfucking
help?” When I go
in, I see him leaning against part of the roof with a CPU in his hands. “Can you get this?” he asks. He doesn’t move as he passes it to me; then
I see why. His upper arm caught on a
nail. “What
happened?” “What do you think happened? I jammed my arm onto this fucking nail.” “Are you okay?” “No, pendejo, it hurts,
so put this in the van.” When I don’t
move, he closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “Are you
deaf? Get the fuck out of here!” I put the CPU down. He needs a tetanus shot, I think, and as I
wonder where we can get one at this hour, Jack yells, “Move, asshole!” He circles his arm with his thumb and
forefinger, a fleshy tourniquet, and pulls himself free. I can’t fit the CPU in the back, so I place it
between the seats. I root around on my
side for a napkin to stop the bleeding, but Jack throws me the keys. “Drive,” he says. “I can take care of myself.” He holds his hand over the wound, until red
seeps between his fingers. I start the
van, which wheezes like an asthmatic.
The steering wheel is as hot as a curling iron. I grit my teeth and wait for the shock of
pain to subside. “What the fuck are you waiting for?” Jack demands,
and I drop my foot onto the accelerator.
* * * Jack was
fired from Hampstead Home when a patient’s daughter caught him with his hand
in her purse. He said that her purse
had fallen and he was simply putting everything back in, but she said that
three hundred dollars were missing.
When he protested, management said that there had been other
complaints. A couple of dollars from a
wallet here, a transistor radio there, doses of
painkillers never delivered. They
never had proof, but, in light of this most recent accusation, they had no
other choice. He was
telling the truth. Jack didn’t steal
the money. He probably did snag the
other stuff—the radios from the dead residents, the pills picked off the
floor when the residents had fallen asleep after palming the Percocet. But all
the orderlies did it—it depended on who was in the room first, who had
rotation. Some took vases of
half-wilted flowers home to their wives.
Mrs.
Brennan, the resident whose daughter got Jack fired, was one of the worse-off
patients—three strokes in six months.
Her daughter visited after each stroke, but never more than that. She bought her mother a Roho
wheelchair with cushions made of pockets of air like a life raft, but was
never around to push her around in it.
So I took
that money. Who wouldn’t have? It was so easy. She left her purse right there. But she didn’t have three hundred dollars;
it was only fifteen. She was trying to
shake Jack down. Wasn’t Jack the one
who made sure that Mrs. Brennan kept her head tipped down, so that she could
chew easier? He tilted her head to the
left, because muscular control on her right side had degenerated, and kept
her sitting upright for an hour after her meal, to aid digestion. Her face drooped, like a candle melting in
the sunlight. I don’t think she
noticed when Jack left. After Jack got canned, he became more
sedentary. When I’d leave for work,
he’d be in his briefs at the table and still there when I got home. For a month, he stayed in the apartment
with the lights off and smoked, an orange dot rising and falling in the
dark. We’d watch TV with the sound
off. I blamed myself kind of—but I
blamed that Brennan bitch more. The
management had decided to make an example of him. He got over it, though. Once he asked how Mrs. Brennan was and
didn’t bat an eye when I told him that she was almost dead. When Mrs.
Brennan was on her last reserves—her mind blown away like dandelion seeds—her
daughter came to review her mother’s EOL forms: power of attorney, advanced
directives. I passed her as she headed
towards the office; her fat face like an inflatable punch clown’s. On either side of her, nurses
chattered—“best care,” “most comfortable,” “unaware”; all code words: she’s already gone. Mrs.
Brennan slumped in her wheelchair, unable to hold herself up. She looked deflated in her own skin. Her mouth hung open, lips shriveled, gums
desiccated. Her breath stank, rotted
from the inside. “Hello,” I
said in the clear voice the nurses ask of us.
“How are you today?” I opened
the window blinds, and she was covered in light, as if someone had thrown a
white sheet over her. “Isn’t today a
beautiful Wednesday?” Her daughter had
left her purse behind again. “Is it too bright for you?” I asked. No one in the hall. Her wallet, thick with leather and clasps,
opened in my hands as if it had missed me.
Thirty-eight in odd bills. It
would do. “It’s nice seeing you again,
Mrs. Brennan,” I said. I took an old,
well-worn dollar bill and crumpled it into Mrs. Brennan’s clawed hand. “Can you hold on to this for me?” I puffed the bill like a carnation so that
her daughter wouldn’t be able to miss it.
Let her figure it out. * * * Maybe
three miles from home, there’s a woman in the middle of the street. We’re in a crackhead
homestead. The houses here are raised
off the ground on concrete blocks because, each summer the sewers overflow,
regurgitating shit into the streets.
But now, the houses have bottomed out, collapsed in on themselves. The
woman waves her arms frantically. Jack says,
“Drive around her,” but I see her crying, her electroshocked
hair, her pleading eyes. Tears have
cleaned rivulets through the grime on her cheekbones, high and full, like
Jack’s. “We should
help her.” “Fuck
her.” Her cries
become more distinct: I need help,
please! Help me!,
a heavy Spanish accent. Jack
sticks his head out the window and yells, “Get out of the road!” He’s fashioned a bandage out of the bottom
of his t-shirt, a red ribbon around his arm. “She really needs help.” “Tell her
to call 911.” “What if
the phone lines are down?” As we drive
near, she calls, “My daughter is hurt bad.”
She looks into my window. “She
must go to a hospital.” I slow to
a roll, like I’m going through a stop sign.
“Don’t be an idiot,” says Jack. But I
ignore him. I’m looking straight at
her; her clothes are torn, filthy. Her
skin is as dark as Jack’s, but whether that’s the pigment or grime, I don’t
know. “Where is she?” I ask. “Over
there,” she says, pointing to one of the ruined houses with a red-painted
fingernail. “She is dying.” I lean
out, trying to see the body. Maybe
it’s just a broken leg, I think. But I
don’t see anything and realize the daughter must be trapped in the
house. Maybe crushed under a wall,
impaled on a falling timber. Maybe
it’s already too late for her. The
woman stares at me with her big eyes, dark as basement stairwells. I hear Jack say, “Oh shit.” He nudges
me with his foot—his feet are flailing, head and shoulders out the window,
his good hand trying to grab the door.
He says, “Get the fuck off—” but the words are cut off by a set of
knuckles. I turn back towards the
woman, but she’s been replaced. A man
grabs the front of my shirt and pulls me out of the window. My feet catch the steering wheel, and he
drops me. My body slams against the
door, and I tumble the rest of the way out.
I brace to avoid a face plant, but asphalt scraps layers off my
arms. Jack is still struggling. I hear scuffling. Under the van: two sets of booted feet dancing with Jack
caught between them in a wet crunch.
His face is dark with blood, smeared across his face like
bruises. The boots kick as if
celebrating. I
roll over, and the woman is there, with a bat. She gives me a thwack and there’s a bright
flash of white, like a gas explosion. When I come to, our van’s gone. Jack is face down on the ground. My insides are all twisted, and vomit
bubbles into my mouth. I spit, and
even that effort causes a blast to go off in my head. So I crawl over to him, calling his
name: Jack. Joaquim. His
breaths are gurgles. Around us, the
houses that aren’t destroyed seem abandoned.
There must be a phone in one of them.
But if I’m in one of those buildings when an aftershock hits—there’s
always more than one—I’ll be killed and no one will know to come get
Jack. I can’t move him. That’s the last thing you should do. I could dislocate his spine,
make a paraplegic out of him. So I
have a better idea. I sit cross-legged
in the street and make us both comfortable.
It’s only a matter of time before someone comes, even to this part of
town. I know that the emergency people
will arrive, sirens screaming, because that’s what they do. Someone has to. Someone will come and save us. |
|
Arts & Letters Campus (478) 445-1289 al@gcsu.edu |
|
Arts & Letters accepts submissions
from September 1 to March 1 (postmark deadlines). For complete information, see submission guidelines. |