“SERIOUS THINKERS”
Zyzzyva (No. 125)
Excerpt
Wednesdays are our rush days.
For all its advances, cryopreservation still carries a stigma. Sci-fi hokum. Bullshit. Bunk. For disbelievers, it represents an assault on the grieving process. It’s portrayed as vampiric, cruel, exploiting the terminally ill for a fantasy of future life.
Which is where Evan and I come in.
We accepted the job one year ago, each stuck in the fog of our diagnoses. In exchange for a well-stocked fridge, a makeshift bedroom next to the janitor’s closet, and a comped down-payment on our future cryo-cylinders, we work the facility for free. Each week, our proverbial pay extends the terms of our cryopreservation contract. As it stands, we’ve banked twenty-two-years of inanimate storage. With every passing day, our odds of reanimation improve.
If you can work for a living, you can work for a dying, too.
I know, I know.
The fact is the routine calms us. The cold. Its steel. Ours is a world where life suspends, and for a while I thought we could just hit the pause button: sweeping the floors, watching a movie, all of it just captured in time, until—poof, we’d be back, twenty, fifty, one hundred years in the future, the broom still held in our hands, the movie still playing on screen. As though we didn’t have to die first. As though we could skip the hard part.
No matter what else was going on—with family, friends, the economy, disaster on the news, the wreckage of my own body—I always wanted a job. Something to do. Maybe it’s a Detroit thing. I once knew a guy who drove the width and breadth of this state cleaning up roadkill. Another who worked security for a shuttered steel mill. We wake up, drag to the odd jobs we’ve claimed, stake a life there.
I’m glad to have the trade to focus on. It gives me a distraction. “Like a worry stone,” my doctor says.
Fine. Like a worry stone.
When I told my family about the gig, all I got were blank stares. My father shrugged it away, playing it down, uncomfortable with any acknowledgement of my illness, my terminal sweetheart sucking oxygen from a tube back home. But his brothers, my hard-drinking uncles, men palsied from years working the chlorine plant, the assembly line, the oil refinery—no such luck. I remember Uncle Lee shaking his head. “I’ve got a perfectly good freezer. Why not stuff yourself in there? It’s yours for a kiss and a back rub.”
Here’s the truth: we’re getting the better end of the deal. We know our value in the marketplace. Skeptical family members, when they arrive at the facility, don’t expect to find their sales rep is also a satisfied customer. That a meager $33,000 in annual salary translates to over $100,000 in bankable funds toward our preservation. Let it never be said the sick can’t negotiate. With nothing to lose, we had everything to gain.
People think we’re crazy. But that isn’t it at all. We’re in love. We’re romantics.
“RISK”
Subtropics (Issue 30/31)
Excerpt
In the wake of her newfound wordlessness, my mother and I established a set of ground rules. If the phone rang, I answered. At the grocery store, I’d point; she’d pay. If a neighbor caught us in the halls, she’d lapse into a coughing fit, hands held up as she slipped around the corner, pardon me, while I stayed behind to make small talk. It worked well enough for us.
Around this time, I started sleeping on her bedroom floor. There was something logical about us then: late, tired, drifting off. The quiet was expected.
When my father left, my mother used to say I “had a thing about touching.” Another way of saying this is: my mother had a thing about not being touched. I would poke her while she made tea, put a hand on her shoulder while she drove. I’m not sure now why I did it. Once she began to withdraw, this touch became a statement, a reminder of my presence. I would stand next to the edge of her bed at night, quiet as can be, and lay a hand against her shoulder. Even then, asleep, she’d bat my hand away.
Look. I know how this all sounds, but it wasn’t like she iced me out. The truth is, I’d stopped answering my mother’s questions long before the silence. Because, boy, for a while there, my mother was a talker. Questions of all kinds: she’d ask about my day, about school, about Jack, what we’d done, where we’d gone, if I’d made any new friends, if I wanted to. And I’d give her these short, one-word answers.
I guess I felt like she should already know. Like I shouldn’t have to tell her.
I want to be clear: She was a good mom. There was always food, a ride to school, something on TV to fill the hours. The only thing that changed was a kind of distance in between.
Another truth: After her disappearance, I spent four days, three hours, and forty-nine minutes rejoicing. I took thirty-minute showers with the dial cranked to hot. I ordered old Die Hard movies, pay-per-view. I melted an entire block of cheese between tortillas.
Register that. An entire block of cheese.
But the novelty soon wore off.
Can you hear me say I inherited her silence? That this was the heirloom she left me?
“THIS IS GOING TO HURT”
Zyzzyva (No. 119: The L.A. Issue)
Excerpt
When we first started out, I thought we were doing a good thing.
It was August, late afternoon. Dwayne and I had just arrived in Grosse Pointe outside one of those giant gated mansions that remind me of old Fitzgerald novels. We had an Arctic Fox penned in a plastic dog crate that used to belong to Dwayne’s parents, and I could hear the creature whine as we drove along the gravel drive. Outside, a private security guard waved us toward a six-door garage at the back of the estate where a man in camouflaged overalls so pristine I knew they had never seen a day of work waited in the shade.
The transaction was quick: a pre-paid money card we scanned for tracking devices using a hacked app on Dwayne’s cell phone. When we handed over the crate, the buyer rolled his garage door halfway open and wordlessly disappeared beneath.
We stood there, waiting. The garage interior was damp. I could feel the dank air wafting from its open door. And a smell, too: stale with sharp, sour notes that made me clench my jaw to breathe between my teeth.
Eventually, Dwayne and I loaded back inside the car to make our exit.
At the estate’s locked gate, the guard waited with his hands clasped behind his back. He did this in a way that made me wonder if he had a gun tucked in his waistband. As we rolled to a stop, Dwayne hand-cranked the driver side window.
“What’s he do with them?” Dwayne asked.
The guard surveyed us with that particular strain of condescension reserved for servants of the wealthy. After a brief pause, he pressed a button on the gate and waved us to the road without reply.
“TERRARIUMS”
The Michigan Quarterly Review (Vol. 57, Issue 3)
Excerpt
You could hear the furniture rearranging inside my father’s skull.
“Breast cancer?” he said. “But men don’t get breast cancer.”
“I’m afraid that’s incorrect.” The doctor’s balding pate, ringed by patchy brown hair, reflected the bright fluorescent lights like an onion pushing from the dirt. “It’s true that men are nowhere near as susceptible to the disease, but that does not make them immune.”
The doctor’s clipped, clinical tone didn’t sit well with my father.
“Oh, it does not make them immune, huh? Well last time I checked, I didn’t have a pair of goddamned teats.”
I groaned into the wool collar of my sweater. The hospital’s air conditioning— astonishingly frigid, even in September—stiffened the stubble along my cheek, causing it to itch. I pawed my jaw distractedly. I avoided eye contact with my father.
“In fact,” the doctor said. His voice treaded lightly from his throat. “Men have the same mammary glands as women. What we lack are the hormones to put those glands to use. Although less prevalent, their presence nevertheless . . . ”
“That’s enough,” my father said. “I had my fill at mammary.”
“ZUG”
Midwestern Gothic (Issue 21)
Excerpt
Outside, Ric and I walked our bikes down the block while we bit into our candy bars. It was hot out. Summer had hop-skipped into May and the flowers, only half-cracked open, were already beginning to droop in the humidity.
So I wasn’t paying attention, really, when we rounded the corner and there it was, nestled tight behind a high-reaching fence and a simple sign for ZUG ISLAND painted in bright red. Beneath this were more signs: NO PHOTOS. NO LOITERING. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I noticed, then, these signs were stationed at regular intervals along the fence line.
I don’t know what I expected. Rust-dust in the wind? Parked cars and tree leaves smudged with smears from smog? Armed soldiers along the shoreline? Or a flat horizon where the island should have been? Proof that the whole thing was made up, start to finish?
It was a dopey little stretch of horizon made of smokestacks. Spiral slides rose from gravel piles, behind which barn-like buildings huddled around a row of iron vats before giving way to the taller, factory-like buildings Ric and I had come to know so well. It looked like a theme park gone wrong. The canal was slim, easily crossed, barely the size of two city blocks. The River Rouge, too blue to live up to its nickname, ran right up to the island’s edge where a low lip of concrete rose up from the waves and hemmed the structure in. Like toy castles in a sandbox.
But past the fence, smoke billowed up from factories blocked from view; movement blurred in the doorways; voices only barely made their way to shore. On the island’s edge, a huddle of gulls dug their webbed feet into the gravel. What were they hiding over there?
Zug. I liked the word. How it sounded like a rock dropped in sidewalk puddles.
“If we pull this off,” I said, “we’ll be goddamned heroes.”
“NIGHT MOVERS”
The Pushcart Prize Anthology XL; Glimmer Train (Issue #90)
Excerpt
Tye’s key ring was stuffed with enough brass I thought someone might leap from the shadows and rob him for it, but the lot was quiet while he fumbled for a key at the mansion’s back door. Above us chimneys spun up and away with a memory of former majesty, but were now canted at an angle, blown sideways by wind and wear. The brick looked to be running the way ink does in the rain. The steps, even, scuffed with rubber that looked like scribbles.
Tye and I were Night Movers, grunts who moved furniture and boxes across empty street-lit highways for clients in a rush to leave the city. I was surprised, after taking the job, at the demand for work like ours: military families with short-notice transfer; the lucky few to land well-paying jobs in the northern suburbs; those unfortunate enough to run afoul of local hoods and dealers. By and large, though, our clients were the tough-as-nails folk who had stubbornly refused to flee until absolutely necessary. Most were evicted, families who spent their ninety days notice warring with the courts to save their home until, on night eighty-nine, they hired us to get them out. Some were simply worn down, overcome with grief or shame as the city sucked still more bodies into its earth. I liked to imagine the time-lapse photo of Detroit from overhead; that it looked like fireworks maybe, filled with taillights blurring as they streamed from the city, burning embers that landed across the country where they slowly cooled to ash.