INTO IT (a novel) Chapters 46-48
Chapter 46: Adam
I step up and into John’s truck, jacked up on a high chassis. We drive east out of town to the outskirts, where the interstate passes by an unfinished cloverleaf overpass that’s far too grand for our small township. I don’t know what they were thinking when they started building it. Maybe that we were going to grow. They must have decided that we weren’t when they abandoned the project. As if everyone knew the cloverleaf was overkill, not part of the town, the police left it to the taggers and skaters and the homeless.
There are quite a few of the homeless there when John and I pull up, Slayer blasting through the open windows and probably waking some of them up. They slowly come out of their cardboard huts and roust themselves from their other makeshift shelters as we get out of the truck.
“What do you want to do about this?” I ask John, worried they’d tell someone about us showing up with a gun. John’s license plate was right there at eye level.
“There’s nothing to be done. They’re here and that’s it,” John says.
His face is grim, his lips bitten into his mouth, and I can tell the jeebs are hitting him hard now that strangers are staring directly at him in anger.
Then he’s pointing the gun at one of them. There is nothing else going on, no change in the world beyond this fact. One person is pointing a gun at another one. The homeless man, gone brown and ratty at the edges, stands the way he’d been standing when John and I drove up: hunched over, head hanging low with his eyes locked on us and now on John’s gun. He might have been the first one to set John off, I don’t know, but he now he’s the one in the position where he must do something, and he does nothing. He stands unchanged by the angle of John’s gun aimed at his gut, John twenty or so feet away, the pistol gripped and shaking a little at the furthest extension of his arm, his elbow locked.
“John,” I say as casually as I can. “We’ve gotta be moving on.”
It’s as though I hadn't said anything. John stands there, the man stands there. There is thinking going on, I believe, on the man’s part. His eyes look like they are measuring something between himself and John, some mental space. Maybe I'm watching someone’s life flash before their eyes. I don’t know what that looks like. Maybe he is measuring out his time on Earth. John isn’t going to shoot the man, I tell myself so I can keep my voice calm.
“Stop pointing it at that guy,” I say.
“Yeah, fuckhead, listen to what your friend is telling you,” says another one of the men standing by a dirty, orange dome tent.
“I’m not a fuckhead, fuckwad,” John says. He lowers the gun. The Drano racing down my arms again, my chest bucking—then John quickly raises it again, this time at the guy who just spoke.
“John,” I say.
I saw things disappearing. Sitting on the couch with my laptop, watching but not watching TV, my mom finally asleep upstairs, the house quiet and still and all to myself and me, comfortable, messaging John when I felt like it. That disappears. Playing with the mice with John vanishes. The running over of Navneen fades. Is this what is like to have my own life flashing in front of my eyes? Because I feel all of it is in danger. Being caught by the police, standing next to John, who has just shot a man under the cloverleaf. Busted. My life falls down and out from under me, spiraling below my feet and into the earth, until it reaches a watching eye’s pupil and disappears.
“John, stop,” I say.
“This is not the first time a gun’s been pulled on me,” says the guy. “But I bet this is the first time you’ve pulled a gun on anyone. And you’re never going to get it out of your head.”
Maybe he wants to die, but I know John doesn’t want to shoot him.
“Shut up,” John yells.
“You’re never going to get it out of your head that you thought about killing someone.”
“Shut the fuck up,” John says. But his gun is lowering, inches at a time, almost with his pulse, bouncing slightly then lowering, bouncing then lowering, a tic on the lean.
“I’m done talking,” the man says.
John lowers the gun to his side. I come around the hood to take the gun away from him, but John whips it away from me before I can make a grab for it.
“Everything’s all right,” he says. “We’re leaving.”
I circle back to my side of the truck, climb aboard, and wait for John to get into the driver’s seat to turn around and take us back to his father’s sock drawer. But I have a premonition that something awful is going to happen. I feel the way I felt when John first raised the gun, but I don’t act on the fear. I sit and wait for John.
Then he’s up and standing on the truck’s running board, the truck shifting with his weight. He swings into the cab, adjusts himself in the seat, and lays his baseball hat on the gear shift. He raises the gun out the window, points it straight up and fires nine blasts like M-80s exploding in a trash barrel (it sounded just like fireworks), and John leans his head out the window and says to the men, “Careful.”
He starts the truck. Soon, we’re on our way back down the same state road that leads to the cloverleaf.
“That could have gone so badly,” I say.
I immediately regret it, knowing that accusing John of being even close to a failure, anything that he has fucked up, will bring about his jeebs faster.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” John says.
Fuck it, I don’t care if his jeebs get worse. He’s going to drop me off at my house, now that I have decided not to go to Meredith’s with a psycho. I push him.
“That’s not entirely the point,” I say.
“What is your meaning?” John says.
“Pointing a gun at two men who know what you look like is the point. Let me cut you off and say, this is not because someone’s out to get you. This is something you did to yourself.”
John stares straight ahead, his hands at ten and two, perfect, his back straight. He’s not smoking out the open window. Smiling, looking better than I have seen him look in a long time. Bright-eyed, clear, alert. I put his look down to the adrenaline cutting through the jeebs, a little like the way he came back from the hospital, artificial and alert and electrified, wired eyes.
I am looking for a moment when I can tell him he needs to take me home, and I’m trying to think of a good reason for turning around and crossing most of town to get my ass safe even while there is a party we are headed toward.
“I’m sick,” I say. I clutch my stomach.
John looks over at me quickly, then looks back at the interstate.
“No, you aren’t.”
“I am sick. My stomach is killing me.”
“Apply pressure,” John says.
“Yeah,” I go. “It’s fucking cramping up and shit. I gotta go home.”
“Maybe you should go to a hospital again,” John says, flat and dry so I know he’s being sarcastic. But of course, he’s not buying this, so I push it a little further to make a joke about it.
“It’s cramping up like a fucker,” I say, trying to put a little of a jokey tone in my voice but, of course, failing. I am not going to Meredith’s with a psycho who’s armed.
“Shut the fuck up!” John shouts. “I’ve been listening to you complain about your stomach all day. Complaining like a whore.”
I do my crazy-ass Middle Eastern Muslim woman thing again, the throat trilling, terrified. A culture where women stand in the street, yelling. In the truck’s cabin I’m pretty loud. I feel better.
“You don’t know what was going on just now, so shut up about it. We’re going to Meredith’s.”
He wants us to go to Meredith’s together because he cannot make it there by himself. He needs someone sane with him, something like a seeing-eye dog.
“Fine,” I say. “But it’s going to be fucking horrible for me standing there while you and Meredith run off into her bedroom to fuck around. Kind of boring to be left out there with everyone else and nothing to do.”
“You can watch,” John says.
I hit him in the meat of his right shoulder hard enough to set the steering wheel shaking and send the truck into oncoming traffic.
Chapter 47: John
So, a test. A jeeb check, and I had passed. I felt nothing but relief and exultation. The chattering girls had completely shut up, and I was riding high in my truck, Adam moaning beside me. Wreckage was beginning to pile up, his self-confidence shattered by what happened back at the cloverleaf and the anticipation, the dread, of going to a social event. He was reduced to a mess. So, the beginning of my disappearance would look like this.
I’m sick, he said.
We were heading toward Meredith’s on the highway back from the cloverleaf and into town, 75 miles per hour, when he punched my arm. In the oncoming car I could see the driver’s face flip to panic. I didn’t know him. He was a stranger, like those men at the cloverleaf, and I was touching their lives, coming out of my tiny bubble, the smallest possible space in which to live. I had reached out with my hand and had made an impression.
I swerved back into my lane and laughed. The car sped by with a screeching of brakes turning deeply pitched as it receded, the famous Doppler effect. I saw more and heard more than that.
Adam did his singing-screeching thing that Muslim women make. Victory or grief. It was sick, and it made me feel better. I forgave Adam for punching me because he could still jihad. I hadn’t crushed that out of him. Just a couple of crazies on their way to a party, the gun still warm against my belly.
I needed to reload. Without taking my eyes off the road, I opened the box of bullets sitting on the dashboard and took out three.
One for me, one for you, and one in case we miss, I said.
I slid the bullets into my jeans pocket. Not that I had a target. My hands were powerful, and their shaking had ceased like the girls in my head.
I pointed my finger at Adam and said, Bang.
Just kidding, Adam said.
Getting better, I took the off-ramp to Meredith’s.
Chapter 48: Adam
A dozen cars that look like they are here for Meredith’s party are parked along the curb, mostly girls’ cars with shit hanging down from their rearview mirrors: spinning crystal balls, dream catchers, ski lift passes. Hers is a normal street, neither rich nor poor. We have to park three blocks from her house. I bump my ankles with my shoes as I walk, opening my football wounds. I’m sweating when we arrive at her house, a single-story home painted light blue. Girls walk into the door ahead of us, girls who know what they are doing and where they are going.
I tell John, “Be on your best behavior. Meaning, don’t be an asshole.”
“That applies to both of us,” John says. He’s rubbing his shoulder and looking hurt, as though my punching his arm was something that could have hurt his feelings. The only thing that could hurt him right now is for someone not to pay attention to him, to leave him alone to stew in his own juices. John is off on his own this evening, spiraling in a direction I’ve never seen before. I want to run away, to snatch his keys from him and make a daring escape with his truck, to run over the girls’ Jettas with his jacked-up truck and make my way home at high speeds.
We go inside her house. It smells of a small animal like a chinchilla, and cinnamon and designer candles, brownies and cutting through it all, wet paint. I suppose my sense of smell is part of what’s made me fat, makes food taste so good, any kind of food, the roadkill John’s always telling me I eat.
The entryway is filled with girls greeting each other, gathering each other into hugs approximating their mothers’ hugs, I’m guessing, at the country clubs or the supermarket aisles, but I have no idea if these girls’ mothers go to country clubs where they meet and are greeted. I have no evidence that these girls are acting like their mothers at all when they hug, and I’m not trying to be cynical, but I suppose that when you’re left out of the exchanges, your mind turns to the easiest story that will make everything look even more fucked-in-a-pattern. Or maybe only my mind works that way.
I’m on the perimeter of the living room, the room the front door opens onto, a room full of girls, but a few straight guys are there too. So, this wouldn’t be a gay outing to paint and glitter and gossip, this was a real party, without parents and with vodka bottles on the dinner table. Meredith must have had something in mind when she invited John to this thing, although I have no idea why she’d allowed me, morbid, to come. I go through the list of self-recriminations. I’m fat, dull, lonely, grayed-out like the static between radio stations, inadequate, slow, ugly, prone to bouts of silence that defy the imaginations of the other kids, who are vocal.
I decide that John has to be the only one to know that I was coming, that I was crashing, to put it better, a small sign-painting party where sooner or later everyone was going to notice me and wonder what he’s doing here and who brought him.
The story that was to come, the story of the fat dude who stands by the wall and stares at everyone kneeling on the floor of Meredith’s living room, paint pens and brushes in their hands, going at poster board and white bed sheets with joy, while the fat boy doesn’t move, only stares at the whole progress of the evening, occasionally taking a paint pen offered by a girl who can’t stand the embarrassment any longer and offers him a try.
I bend over the blank paperboard. Dizziness overcomes me. I smell the antiseptic from the hospital yesterday and choke back vomit. I have a green pen in my right hand and I’m leaning most of my weight against my left hand as I go to my knees. I don’t see how I’m going to be able to kneel here, so close to the others while my chest is filling up with puke and I suddenly need to pee. I make the words, revolver in the sock drawer, with my lips.
I hear John, spectral, on the other side of the room, saying hey to some guys in letterman’s jackets. They’re laughing. John’s doing something approaching laughing, but with no humor in it, no authenticity. He sounds like he is having more fake fun than anyone else in the house.
This would explain, I think, him standing at the edge of the circle of painters, breathing the fumes that hang heavily in the room, his acceptance of Meredith as someone who could pay him some attention and get some in return from him. There’s this great opening up going on in him. I have never been afraid of John before.