Shaken as an infant, abandoned by my father, and squeezed through time and circumstance, I find myself some thirty-odd years later, here, retching onto a frosty hedgerow outside the town house I rent with my mother. I pull myself into focus, and my stomach feels stretched and snapped like a surgeon’s glove. This is coastal Florida. Our row of homes sits along the Gulf shore, but it’s freezing, so I pretend there’s snow and tilt my head to catch an imaginary flake on the tongue, a miracle. An egret on the sidewalk pecks at a worm and fails to kill it. I stamp it out of its misery and grind with the heel. Then, finally, after I stare down the sun, it begins to set for the last time before The Great New Millennium, century twenty-one.
Inside, my mother’s on the couch with her boyfriend. The King of Sanitation, they call him. (“You’re not customers. You’re family.”) They link hands and watch Jeopardy!, both wearing their New Year’s hats. There’s glitter on their brows and on the carpet, too.
“You out there for some air, bud?” says The King. “Cold weather to end the year on, but that can be good for you.” I don’t bother telling him that, no, dumbass, my pharynx is contracting from the fluid produced by an acute anxiety spell. The television goes static, and he gets up to fidget with the antenna, as he is wont to do these nights he visits.
Mom looks good, rosy and done up for the first time in a while, and that admittedly makes me happy. Her hair bobs above her shoulders. Her lashes are curled long, and she wears a slender-fitting dress that covers one shoulder and exposes the other. For all of last week Mom wore the same sweatpants, and when she burned her wrist on the oven rack, she spent the rest of the night crying about death and the pearly gates, the inevitability of her struggling ventricles, her failing heart. To help I recited that joke about the Chihuahua and the top hat because she likes that one, but it only worked insofar as she could take a few breaths of calmness.
“We’ve got those dinner reservations later,” she says with tenderness. “We’d both like you to come, get out into the world. Could be back to watch the fireworks over the water after.”
I swallow the acid in my throat. “Told you no, but thanks. I have to grade papers.”
“School’s out for break, my man,” The King says. Just like that, he catches the fib and has to remind me of my embarrassing things, throw them in my face: That this PhD is worth a square of toilet paper. That I’m only a history adjunct at the state college, and I am stuck in-progress on my book of the Roman emperors. That I don’t get offered many classes, and when I do, a lot of them don’t even make enough enrollment, so I can’t afford a place all my own.
I say I’m headed to my room and touch my mom on the shoulder to signal I love her but I just can’t leave the house with this disposition, and certainly not with him, The King. She nods because she always tries to understand. We ride the same wavelength. Her style is compassion.
I boot up the computer, and the internet begins to gargle, to dial up. I wait. There’s the pornography folder, but my heart’s not into it. I’m distracted by what happened earlier, this guy who came by in a backpack selling doomsday gear, like radiation goggles and non-perishables. I asked him his deal, and he said that come the year 2000 all the aircraft fall from the sky, the grid fails, the microwaves explode, the chips burn out. He scratched his shin. “Okay,” I said. “But then what does this mean for my mother’s pacemaker?” He said, “Don’t know, broseph. Sorry to say, but she might be a goner,” and turned to haul away his batteries and peanuts.
I’m aware of all the apocalyptic speculations—who isn’t by now?—and I think of them as absurd and pathetic but my worry does stay with my mother and that precautionary yet essential electronic machine designed to zap her heart, her fundamental organ.
This sort of panic I now type to Mantis in our private chat, so I can get these worries out into the open. I don’t have to wait long; she’s always online when I need her. I’ve never seen Mantis in person, but I choose to imagine her as such: a tidy woman my age, her plush visage illuminated by a computer screen in the wet, stone basement of a convent in Rome, perhaps, or at least in some adjacent township. Because of this glowing, one must be able to see the moisture on her upper lip and the tiniest amount of peach fuzz, almost translucent. She will occasionally press her palm down the front of her habit to smooth any wrinkled fabric. Undoubtedly, it’s past sleeping hours, and if caught, the reprimand she would receive from her superior would be severe. But I am worth that risk to her.
And for that I am in love, whoever she might actually be.
If all collapses, Mantis says, her text appearing in our chat thread. You know. How will we communicate without the web? Give me your address now, sweetheart???
I’m not ready for that, not quite, not yet at the phase of my life for a romance to become tangible. I steer the conversation back to my mother.
But the end of the world, it’s not factual or actual, right? I type. And my mother’s pacemaker isn’t necessarily needed anyway, right? It’s like break-in-case-of-emergency, right?
I pick at my thumbnail and examine my space, the dinginess in here, the dusty vent, the one bulb. And then there’s what’s taped to the modem: a scrawl written by Mom’s fingers on the back of a heart-healthy pamphlet, a poem from her most recent hospital stay. I don’t like crying, so I never read any lines except the last one. In heaven or blazing hell, we’ll love each other just as well. That’s true.
If real, Mantis says, one startle, and if that heart stops without the machine? She dies??
Possibly. Yes.
My poor baby, Mantis says, because kindness is among her highest virtues. Then a couple beats. So address yet??? she asks.
The King knocks, opens the door like he’s a chum or some kind of dad. “Bud, I want to beg you,” he says. “I’ll even bribe you if I have to.” He tosses his gaudy silver watch onto my bed as an olive branch. “It’ll mean the world to your mother if you tag along.” I close my eyes but glare at him through my lids, which can be a more potent strategy. “I know it’s because of me,” The King says. “But it’s not like I can back out, can I? Me, you, we’re both trying to help her enjoy the simple things while we still have time to.” He extends his hairy hand for a shake.
I summon courage. People know of my width but forget my length, so I stand to exist above him. I’m quiet. I spin the ceiling fan blade.
“Okay, I get it,” The King says and turns to leave because I have used intimidation. “Keep the watch.” I secure The King’s timepiece around my wrist and it suits me well—me in my finery.
I lock the door and feel almost brave enough to give Mantis my address. I type in the coordinates and hover my index above the ENTER key, only to delete without sending. Again, there’s the porn folder, and this time I’m feeling it.
Just moments after my culmination there are gunshots—no, firecrackers—outside my window. A group of starlit teens launch the explosives overhead, and I twitch when they ignite above the ocean tide. A wiry kid in a jacket and shorts tosses one of the bombs to his friend, who runs before the bang, before there is damage to any extremities. Their bare feet leave spastic imprints in the sand. The impact zone of their debris inches closer to the marsh-end of the beach and toward what they probably can’t see in the darkness: my pal Rex’s RV, stationed among the sea brush.
I open the window. “Stop it,” I whisper, even though I too would like such fun. I’ve never been a good disciplinarian. Cases in point? My students. Occasionally they break my chalk before I arrive to the classroom, as if I were a dunce. They sometimes snicker, heckle my belly. There has been snorting, frightening faces during lectures. I speak toward the floor to prevent any conflict because they are unkind company.
My wall rumbles with the sounds of pipes and faucets, which means Mom or The King or both are showering for dinner. Out of fear of being within earshot of possible intercourse, I step through the window threshold and slide myself out and onto the sand. It triggers the floodlight. I tremble even though I’ve secured my peacoat, and when I raise my arm to wave at the children, they scatter as if I’m the village ogre.
Rex must’ve noticed me from his RV. He hobbles out the door and flashes a peace sign to beckon. My left ear rings vaguely, a result of my anticipation flaring up, and my tinnitus. My boots conceal my feet and ankles, so as I walk toward Rex’s place and turn back, my prints appear blocked and mechanical in contrast to the feral steps of the teens.
He pours me something warm and gritty from a blender, and I drink before saying hello because this is our ritual. Rex handles the maintenance in our complex and is the only man who’s slept with my mother I appreciate. I just about love him, my only true offline friend. He is nearing seventy. So perhaps due to his tenure, he’s accumulated his fair amount of the world’s paraphernalia. He’s got it all: bean bags, katanas, ashtrays from every state. Books climb from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. He says he’s written more than twenty. I can’t even complete one.
I give him the brass tacks regarding my mother’s artery channels, her shock-rhythms, her emergency defibrillator.
“Can’t help with your mom, dude,” Rex says and pulls me to the space next to him on the sofa. “Been there. Tried that.” A calico claws itself onto Rex’s lap, then paws at the hair hanging from his chin. “I might be good with appliances but nothing like that, nothing on the inside, all that squishy stuff. Gal’s been on her way out for a while, besides.”
He pushes away the cat, crosses his legs, and fills a balloon with nitrous. Inhales. I do the same—my self-granted indulgence and as far into the underworld as I’m willing to venture. The gas unscrambles my innards, and for those thirty seconds all thoughts are fireflies, all worries miasma, far above the ozone.
Rex asks if he can snap a couple photos of me with my arms behind my head, says I’m cute that way. And even though it’s odd, I can’t help but turn flushed and flattered. He takes a few, and I sit again while he winds the camera film.
“I’m no mystic,” Rex says. “But this end-of-the-world bullshit might actually hold some merit. Just think of the rhymes: JFK. Y2K. And what’s the common denominator?” He uses the inside of his shirt collar to blow his nose. “That’s right, my dude: the fucking CIA.”
“Hmm.” I can’t blame Rex. Like with the constellations, when there are so many billions of burning suns, how can you not be tempted to connect them all, to sketch the handsomest images to mend the loneliness? “And then there’s MLK,” I gift him. “But why would the CIA want to kill my mom?”
He palms my knee, massages the top and then tries to pry at the cap with his index finger. “Why wouldn’t they?” he says.
Rex has the shakes of a motor, so he asks if there’s any booze at my place and if anyone’s home. And yes I do have a few bottles in the high drawers, even though The King has recently convinced my mother to stay on the wagon. Rex takes the lead and we exit toward the sand, but out of impulse or kleptomania, I snag the disposable camera he’s left on a stack of old newspapers and put it in my coat pocket.
I show Rex in the front, since The King’s car is gone for dinner. The heater is buzzing, so I toss my coat on the kitchen counter. I pour him two fingers of some kind of scotch and he drinks it like he’s sucking on honey. He insists I match him, but it’s difficult, I say. It tastes like towering Vesuvius, the metro killer. Rex has no idea what I’m saying—which is nothing, really—but he laughs and lifts himself to kiss my earlobe, nonetheless. This is nothing to make a fuss about and far from the first time. He nods toward my room, and as we pass the television, Dick Clark winks at the camera, snow on his shoulders.
My bed is dusty, but we are warm under the quilt. Rex holds my fetal body from behind and reaches for my member. This is as far as it ever goes, and he understands. I am not of that persuasion, I don’t think, so I lie un-erected.
After a bit, before I’m asleep, Rex releases his grip and glides his hand over my chest. I am glad for this, Rex’s presence, his encompassing, sweaty comfort. I wonder if The King provides this security for my mother. I’m tempted to hope so. Eventually Rex grabs and yanks the hair on the top of my scalp, the wiry bunch barely clinging to the follicles, then exits out the open window, leaving nothing but drool on the pillow.
I load up the instant messenger to check on Mantis’s New Year’s situation, to see if there’s devastation to her time zone, but no response even after seven-plus minutes.
Systems down? I ask. Send SOS? To what latitude/longitude???
I shut my eyes and visualize: Much ruin. Her town aflame. Mantis clutches her rosary beads, dodging sparks from outlets and fixtures. The other sisters cower in desperate prayer. She holds a candle stick both for illumination and defense, and when she makes her way out and into the mist, she slips and cuts her cheek on the sharp stem of a poison hemlock. The wind snuffs her flame, and after she spies her way up the brick path to the medical clinic, half of the structure has crumbled to rubble. A howling queue of civilians waits outside. Mantis falls forward onto her elbows, and the gravel makes its way into her like splinters of shaved metal. Despite the circumstance, she is affronted by the power of her own slender beauty. She curses the Lord for this matter—that she cannot match the ugliness of the scene around her, that she stands out. She is an outlier, living as contrast. Her eyebrows furl and she screams my name for help. I cannot reach her without the web, and in this instant, I fear our tether has been clipped, umbilically.
I type my address into the message box, delete, type again, then finally press SEND.
Mantis does not reply, so I do the same again, hoping for any sign of life and to give her a place to run toward. But no. There is an error message, and our chat window closes. When I attempt to reboot the program, it fails. Her username no longer exists, it tells me. Gone. Evaporated.
I pop an antacid. It lodges sideways in my throat, and I choke until my cough ejects the tablet and my spittle seeps into the carpet fibers.
In the kitchen I gargle water from the tap, then dampen a slice of white bread with milk to soothe my esophagus and to provide myself a meager amount of sustenance. A cockroach claws its way out of the electrical socket by the telephone, and I think of what people say about their ability to survive nuclear fallout, but I don’t want to muse on that. I slam it, smear it across the marble surface with the edge of my fist and rinse it down the garbage disposal.
Headlights cut through the window blinds, the deadbolt releases, and in struts Mom with a plastic bag. She’s all giggles, happy and filled with three courses. She comes in for the hug, and I press my chin to her forehead.
“Where is he?” I say. “The King.”
“In his car listening to his cassettes.” She extends the bag for me to reach inside, and I remove a box of sparklers. “He wants to give us space.” She sees the trail of insect. I wipe it away, and she smiles like it never happened.
Mom insists on lighting the sticks on the beach, so she wrenches her feet out of her heels, and I notice they’ve ballooned again, swollen from ankle to toe. She stops me when I bring up her circulation. Mom breathes heavily, and I wonder if it’s tipsiness from the night out, but there is no whiff of wine. I ask if she hurts. She doesn’t answer, just tugs my wrist to follow. I grab my coat.
The sand takes her up to the ankle, but me, I feel buoyant. I am lighter alongside my mother. I could float across the Gulf of Mexico if I chose to, big belly up, drawn by the Gulf Stream into the Atlantic beast and back. Mom stifles a wheeze into her elbow and tries to play it off as a laugh. Her breath has gone short. She points eastward down the shoreline, and in the middle distance, a lonely hot air balloon glides gently home to Earth. Probably lovebirds, high on kissing and helium inhalation. Its small flame dims. They land safely from such height.
“I didn’t know anyone was allowed to fly those at night,” I say.
Mom looks at me with a shine in her eyes—the sort I know from her old yearbook photos, gleaming with youth and a long, fortunate future. “How about,” she says, “we let everyone off the hook tonight?”
I shuffle into the ocean only because she asks me to. It’s coldest around my toenails. The hem of her dress is now soaked, and I can’t help but look to where her lungs are hidden, then to where her heart lives, imagining the struggling artery that connects the two.
“Your pacemaker,” I say aloud, and my mouth dries from the rough texture of the word. “Does it really work?”
“It works exceptionally,” she says and walks backward, barely missing a pile of tangled weeds. “Unfortunately, exceptionally is all it can do.”
Finally we strike up our sparklers and do a little marveling at the size of the moon. I accidentally allow the stick to burn my thumb. It hurts like grieving, so I let it fall and hold the finger out to show my mother.
“What is life to you?” she says. “To you specifically.”
The world has me cornered, so I say, “I don’t know. An accumulation of seemingly minor moments, that, when compressed into segments, create escalating consequences which eventually influence our collective experiential decisions on the planet, thereby causing a perpetual series of syllogistic patterns until we inevitably extinguish.”
A big fish, now, swimming unusually close.
“Why don’t you love yourself as much as you love me?” she says.
I try to conjure a response, but this only makes my memories activate, those of a single mother and her only son, infant images: bubbles in the bathtub, the surprising palms of peekaboo, birthday candles and tree ornaments, car seat buckles, the tickling of my soles. “Are you afraid you don’t deserve it?” she says.
I try to breathe more deeply, from my diaphragm. There are tears, obviously, but the ocean mist conceals them against my cheeks. Mom reaches to hold me, and I bend to press my temple to her shoulder. In a tenor, she sings the hymn I used to love from Sunday mass, “On Eagles’ Wings,” that windy song. I step back, eased.
She lights one last sparkler, and The King’s watch shows a quarter to midnight. I remove Rex’s camera from my coat pocket in order to capture a spirit all but vanished. My mother twirls. Her hair is newly short and dyed red. Before, she’d always found that color too daring. She is gaunt in face and stature, but in her current movement it is no longer jarring—an unwinding figurine in a jewelry box. I snap away. I capture grace. She poses, then steps over a blue crab and kicks the surf in my direction. Sure as hell she would swim if she could, but her heartbeat won’t allow it. My mother asks me to guess the letters and words she writes in the air, her flaming, winding strokes, and I use the last click of the camera to preserve the instance. The ball will soon drop, but here, over the Gulf of Mexico, the stars remain random. They cross each other’s brilliance and dance over and behind us to the mainland side—the vibrance of ’99 waning.
A week before the spring equinox, year 2000, my mother died of cardiac arrest, and I try not to dwell on it too much or too little.
It occurred the night we went to the bowling alley. We both made fun of my foot size as I struggled to knot the laces of the rented shoes, and I joked that she was one to talk. My mother could barely lift the lightest ball, so I would hold her arm and help guide it backward, then forward, to push and urge toward the pins. She winked with both eyes when a few would fall. The two of us, slipping on the hard wood, clumsy as clowns in baggy clothes.
Now it is just The King and me. The King has moved into the house, into Mom’s room, because he misses her. He still spends his nights in despair—crying in the living room, in the bathroom, sometimes even on the floor of my room when I am compelled to join. We are closer now, after many months of this year. At the end of each, he writes me a check for half the rent. I brew the coffee in the morning. In the evening he prepares supper.
Rex, the over-lover of life, stopped by to deliver his sympathies and salutations, but he wrote no card. He was cruising west to find California, he said, to pursue late-life political ambitions, or maybe even a little commercial acting. I wished him well with a handshake and nothing more.
I’ve taken to pedaling my Schwinn to campus, but this morning I hitch a ride on the back of The King’s garbage truck because he gets a kick out of it. I white-knuckle the rail and nod to all who will never experience this privilege and power. Today though, The King doesn’t drop me at the pedestrian trail. Instead, with no decal, he parks in the student lot—who is going to tow a vehicle like this?—and asks if he can sit in on my classes. He’s a fish out of water in his company polo. I wear my wool suit jacket even though it’s ninety degrees.
8:50 is Roman Mythology. The King takes a spot in the back corner, and I tell the kids he’s here to evaluate the learning experience. Confused, they engage their best behavior. The King asks the student next to him for a sheet of looseleaf and a pen. He writes when I speak.
I’ve grown more confident manipulating the accoutrements of the classroom, so I use the projector to bring to life a rendering of the Roman deity Cerberus, a three-headed canine, the guard and minder of the underworld. A springy boy in glasses asks if this animal is indigenous only to the Mediterranean, or has it ever come to the contiguous U.S. Before I can respond, The King pipes up. “Listen, bud,” he says. “It ain’t real. None of this shit is actual or factual.”
So as not to pierce anyone’s bubble, I tell them mythology is as real as we perceive it to be. The Romans saw in these gods beauty and hope and justice and fear. In my opinion, a figure of the past is only fictional if you let those truths fade or be forgotten.
In my office The King wants to know what the fuck that even means, and I shrug and say that in this line of work you have to think on your toes, that it’s part and parcel of the gig, and sometimes words might simply spew as such. I ask if I can see what he wrote down, and he supposes so as he tosses the folded paper across my desk. The sentimental element in me expects a romantic moment in which the sunlight splits the cloudy shawl over my window to illuminate a vulnerable poem, The King having connected the metaphorical implications of today’s lesson with the sweetness of Mom’s legacy. But it’s not much, a crude sketch of Cerberus the dog smoking a cigar and a scribble to further look up the subject at the library.
There is an hour before my next class, but The King doesn’t take the opportunity to leave. He sticks around, folds his arms over his stomach, and falls asleep with his mouth open. Rex’s camera sits on my bookshelf, and no doubt its contents have overwhelmed The King, to whom I’ve told what’s on the film: my mother lives there, undeveloped.
A trait I’ve absorbed from The King’s demeanor is the desire to console. So I stand to reach and hold his shoulder. I even wet my lips to whisper like my mother would, but the door opens with no warning.
For a moment I expect Mantis, as I do lately, often, paranoid and fearful. Now thrown into the bin along with my computer, she remains a specter, no longer needed, and I am unsure if I would even be welcoming of her arrival. Mantis was born of my past self, not of my present maturation. If I were to meet her, or whoever controlled her messaging account, I would like to say: Thank you for the help and benevolence, but your manifestation is a stark reminder of my tendency for agoraphobia, the diabolical characteristic I am in the process of expunging. Or something to that effect.
However this, here and now, is only a frantic student, a boy with hair to his narrow shoulders. I struggle to recall his name, and he pays no mind to the sleeping man in the chair. He’s been absent this week, he says, because his dorm has flooded, he says, because his car is getting repaired, he says, and his parrot is sick. He has documentation. The boy asks for an extension. I grant it.
When my classes finish, The King is off to complete his rounds, so I get home by way of city bus. Inside the portico of our town house, against the door and nestled beside a clay pot of grayed soil, rests a delicately wrapped bouquet of calla lilies, tulips, peonies, and one rose—beautiful and tenderhearted—a gift which arrives every twelve or so days since my mother’s passing, that one might reasonably conclude is, in fact, from Mantis herself. But the card is nameless.
Inside, the refrigerator drones, and a wren sings along from outside the kitchen window. The word is harmony. I clip the stems, remove any browning leaves, and I lay the flowers on the dinner table for The King to arrange later.